Port Raises $100M at $800M Valuation to Transform Developer Portal into AI Agent Command Center

Port raises $100M at $800M valuation to take on Spotify's Backstage | TechCrunch

Spotify may be synonymous with music streaming, but it's also got a wildly popular developer-tool side-hustle 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 a build-it-yourself option. Israeli startup Port has been gaining big-name customers like GitHub, British Telecom and LG with a proprietary Backstage competitor: a dev tool portal that's also now been geared to manage AI agents. On Thursday, Port, founded in 2022, said it raised a fresh $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, announced in May. Of all the industries that LLM-based tech has infiltrated, coding is where it has the deepest roots. So, not surprisingly, developers are also on the cutting edge of building and adopting agents that can automate entire repeated processes -- work far beyond asking AI to write some code. But the problem here, according to Port co-founder and CEO Zohar Einy, it's the wild west right now for such devtool agents at companies: finding them, sharing them, ensuring their work follows company standards and so on. Developers "want to take AI beyond just coding. They want it to resolve incidents, resolve security issues. They want it to take care of the release management," Einy told TechCrunch. 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 collaborate, and have no corporate standards and guardrails, "it creates chaos," his product pitch goes. Port therefore offers more than just a catalog of dev and agent tools (although it does offer that). It supplies a layer of orchestration with features that measure agent performance and add a human-in-the-loop, as desired, to approval processes. A feature called "context lake" defines the data sources, context memory, and guardrails for agents. "It's where you manage what agents 'need to know' to do their job safely and correctly," Einy explained. In addition to using Port to catalog agents devs have already created using other tools, they can use Port to create new agents. Plus, Port also offers a few of its own ready-made agents, which can do things like resolving helpdesk tickets and dealing with provisioning. Einy describes his product as handling the other 90% of what software programmers do that isn't writing code. "It gives the engineers a user interface to control the agent, to iterate with the agent, to approve what it does that is not coding, that is all the 90%." With its giant new war chest of cash, big name customers and tier-one VCs, Port looks like an agentic management startup to watch. But to say it faces competition is an understatement. The entire category of agentic management and orchestration is flooded with hopefuls, from big tech companies to startups, and they're all coming at the various new problems in the space from different angles. A few of these include LangChain, UiPath, Cortex and more.

Port nets $100M to turn its developer portal into an agentic AI hub - SiliconANGLE

Port nets $100M to turn its developer portal into an agentic AI hub With a $100 million funding round announced today, Port IO Ltd. is positioning itself at the center of a fast-emerging shift toward agentic artificial intelligence platforms that automate large parts of the software development lifecycle. General Atlantic led the Series C round with participation from Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners and Team8. Combined with the company's previous $35 million Series B round, the new capital brings the total funding raised to $158 million, valuing the company at $800 million. Port is the provider of an internal developer portal, which acts as a system of record for all the work a developer does while building, maintaining, testing and orchestrating software engineering. It has tools for tracking projects, connecting to everyday tools developers use during the development lifecycle and interconnecting the rest of the team with operations. The company said its next step is to build an agentic engineering platform, or AEP, that will do more than provide an integrated, collaborative workspace. It aims to proactively assist engineering teams by bringing AI to the entire software development lifecycle and placing it at the beck and call of developers. "If you want something like autonomous ticket resolution, a coding assistant isn't enough," Port co-founder and Chief Executive Zohar Einy said. "It requires a full agentic system with multiple agents, teams, the right context for each agent, guardrails and audit." Under Port's vision, the AEP will be a layer on top of the existing developer portal, becoming a command-and-control center that allows human developers to guide the activities of autonomous AI agents. According to Einy, the addition of agentic AI to its platform is a natural evolution following how the company's portal provides everyday access to self-service actions with a powerful software catalog and productivity monitoring. Armed with access to this knowledge graph of services, components and workflows, Port's AI agents will be able to resolve tickets, self-heal incidents, fix vulnerabilities and maintain best practices. Developers remain "human-in-the-loop," guiding, reviewing and approving AI-driven work through the dashboard. Developer environments have grown so fragmented that teams often spend more time navigating tools than writing code, a problem Port argues its unified portal and agent layer can finally address. They spend only a portion of their time writing code in an editor. Afterwards, they must test, verify and reconcile potential issues from new functions and applications; then work alongside operations to deploy and maintain the released code. In a DevOps team, operations maintain a tight collaboration with development to provide rapid feedback from monitoring about potential bugs, bottlenecks or other needs so that developers can fix them quickly. Port already offers an AI assistant called Port AI in open beta mode. It operates through the dashboard, understands the current state of project progress and development through the catalog and tracking services. Users can also define and build AI agents to complete tedious tasks, such as answering complex questions and automating tedious self-service actions. Currently, the platform provides multiple ready-made agents, which complete tasks such as resolving issue tickets and handling resource setup and configuration. Port already offers an AI assistant, Port AI, in open beta mode. It operates inside the dashboard, understands project state through the catalog and tracking services, and allows users to define and build AI agents for tasks such as answering complex questions or automating repetitive self-service actions. The platform includes several ready-made agents capable of resolving issue tickets and managing resource setup and configuration. Port said that it intends to make AI agents "first-class citizens" by integrating them directly into the portal and the EAP will be the culmination of that vision. Port's push into agentic automation enters an accelerating arms race among DevOps and developer-experience vendors, each hoping to become the default interface where engineers orchestrate both code and AI collaborators. Developer and DevOps platforms such as Spotify AB's Backstage already provide a popular open-source setting for developer portals. Lifecycle management startups for engineering teams, such as Harness Inc., also offer agentic AI-driven workflow automation from build to release, and process automation giants such as UiPath Inc. have begun incorporating agentic capabilities. Port's value proposition is that users will not only receive access to agentic AI automation capabilities, but the best-in-class developer experience, where they can manage the increasing sprawl affecting their tools and work.