Spotify is widely known for music streaming, but it also has a popular developer tool side project called Backstage. Backstage is an open source project that helps companies build their own internal developer portals. These portals catalog developer tools, provide quick visualizations of the work those tools have done, and track other metrics. However, like many open-source projects, Backstage requires a build-it-yourself approach.
An Israeli startup named Port has been gaining major customers like GitHub, British Telecom, and LG with a proprietary alternative to Backstage. This developer tool portal is now also geared to manage AI agents. Recently, Port announced it raised a new $100 million Series C funding round. The round was led by General Atlantic, with participation from Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Team8. This investment 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, which was announced earlier.
Of all the industries that LLM-based technology has entered, coding is where it has the deepest roots. Unsurprisingly, developers are now on the cutting edge of building and adopting agents that can automate entire repeated processes, which goes far beyond simply asking AI to write code. According to Port co-founder and CEO Zohar Einy, the current state of such developer tool agents within companies is like the wild west. The challenges include finding them, sharing them, and ensuring their work follows company standards.
Developers want to take AI beyond just coding. They want it to resolve incidents, tackle security issues, and manage releases. But if agents are connected to various tools and scattered data sources, with no way to collaborate and no corporate standards, it creates chaos. Port’s product aims to solve this problem.
Port offers more than just a catalog of developer and agent tools. It provides a layer of orchestration with features that measure agent performance and allow for human-in-the-loop approval processes. A feature called “context lake” defines the data sources, context memory, and guardrails for agents, managing what agents need to know to do their job safely and correctly.
In addition to cataloging agents built with other tools, developers can use Port to create new agents. Port also offers a few of its own ready-made agents, which can handle tasks like resolving help desk tickets and managing provisioning. Einy describes the product as handling the other 90% of what software programmers do that isn’t writing code, giving engineers a user interface to control, iterate with, and approve the actions of agents.
With its new funding, prominent customers, and support from top-tier venture capital firms, Port appears as a significant startup to watch in agentic management. However, saying it faces competition is an understatement. The entire category of agentic management and orchestration is flooded with contenders, from large tech companies to startups, all addressing the new challenges from different angles. Some of these competitors include LangChain, UiPath, and Cortex.