Spotify may be synonymous with music streaming, but it also has a hugely popular developer tool called Backstage.
Backstage is an open source project that helps companies create their own internal developer portals: a catalog of their developer tools along with quick visualizations of the work the tools have done and other metrics. But like many open source projects, Backstage is a build-it-yourself option.
Israeli startup Port has landed big-name customers like GitHub, British Telecom and LG with a dedicated competitor to Backstage: a programming tools portal that’s also now designed to manage AI agents.
On Thursday, Port, founded in 2022, said it raised a new $100 million Series C round led by General Atlantic, with participation from Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners and Team8. The round values Port at $800 million and brings its total funding to date to $158 million. This Series C follows the company’s $35 million Series B led by Accel and Bessemer, was announced in May.
Of all the industries LLM-based technology has penetrated, coding is where it has the deepest roots. So it’s no surprise that developers are also on the cutting edge of creating and adopting agents that can automate entire repetitive processes—they go far beyond asking AI to write some code.
But the problem here, according to Port co-founder and CEO Zohar Einy, is the Wild West right now for such developer tools agents in companies: finding them, sharing them, making sure their work follows company standards, etc.
Developers “want to take AI beyond just coding. They want it to solve incidents, solve security issues. They want it to take care of traffic management,” Einy told TechCrunch.
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But if agents are connected to all kinds of different tools and data sources, if the data is scattered among them, if they have no way to work together and have no corporate standards and guardrails, it “creates chaos,” product promotion goes.
As such, Port offers more than just a list of developer tools and agents (although it does). It provides an orchestration layer with features that measure agent performance and add a human in the loop, as desired, to approval processes.
A feature called the “context pool” defines the data sources, context memory, and guardrails for the agents. “It’s where you manage what agents need to know to do their jobs safely and correctly,” Einy explained.
In addition to using the port to catalog agents that developers have already created using other tools, they can use the Port to create new agents. In addition, Port also offers some of its own ready agents, who can do things like help desk ticket resolution and supply handling.
Einy describes his product as handling the other 90% of what software developers do that isn’t writing code. “It gives engineers a user interface to control the agent, iterate on the agent, approve what it’s doing that’s not coding, that’s the whole 90%.”
With its giant new war chest of cash, big-name customers and first-tier VCs, Port looks like a managed agent startup to watch. But to say it faces competition is an understatement.
The entire agent management and orchestration category is flooded with hopefuls, from Big Tech companies to startups, all approaching the various new problems in the space from different angles. Some of them include LangChain, UiPath, Cortex and others.
