Port raises $100 million at $800 million valuation to rival Spotify’s Backstage

Spotify may be synonymous with music streaming, but it also has a very popular side tool for developers called “backstage.”

Backstage is an open source project that helps companies build 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 an option that you can build yourself.

Israeli startup Port has gained big-name clients like GitHub, British Telecom, and LG with a proprietary Backstage competitor: a development tools portal that’s now also geared toward managing AI agents.

Port, founded in 2022, said Thursday it has 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, Announce in May.

Of all the industries that LLM-based technology has infiltrated, programming is the one Where it has the deepest roots. So, it’s no surprise that developers are also at the forefront of building and adopting agents that can fully automate repetitive processes — work that goes far beyond asking AI to write some code.

But the problem here, according to Port co-founder and CEO Zohar Aini, is the Wild West right now for corporate development tool agents: finding them, sharing them, making sure their work follows company standards and so on.

“Developers want to take AI beyond just programming. They want it to resolve incidents and solve security issues. They want it to take care of release management,” Eni told TechCrunch.

But if agents are tied to all kinds of different tools and data sources, if data is scattered among them, if they don’t have a way to collaborate, and don’t have institutional standards and guardrails, it “creates chaos,” his product pitch says.

Thus, Port offers more than just a catalog of development tools and agents (although it does offer that). It provides a layer of orchestration with features that measure agent performance and adds a human element in the loop, as desired, to approval processes.

A feature called “Context Lake” identifies data sources, context memory, and guardrails for agents. “It’s where you manage what agents need to know to do their jobs safely and correctly,” Eni explained.

In addition to using the port to index agents that developers have already created using other tools, they can use the port to create new agents. In addition, Port also offers a few of its own out-of-the-box agents, which can do things like resolve help desk tickets and handle provisioning.

Eni describes his product as handling the other 90% of what programmers do without writing code. “It gives engineers a user interface to control the agent, iterate with the agent, approve what it does and it’s not coding, and that’s the whole 90%.”

With its massive new cash pool, big-name clients, and top-tier venture capital, Port looks like an agent management startup worth watching. But to say it faces competition is an understatement.

The entire agent management and orchestration category is full of aspirants, from big tech companies to startups, all of whom are approaching the diverse new problems in the space from different angles. A few of these include langshenUiPath, Cortex, and more.