Spotify may be synonymous with music streaming, but it also has a sideline in a hugely popular developer tool called “Backstage.”
Backstage is an open source project that helps companies build their own internal developer portals. A catalog of developer tools and an easy visualization of the work they did and other metrics. However, like many open source projects, Backstage is an option to build yourself.
Israeli startup Port uses its own Backstage competitor to win big customers like GitHub, British Telecom, and LG. Backstage is a developer tools portal that also supports AI agent management.
On Thursday, Port, founded in 2022, announced it has raised another $100 million in a Series C round led by General Atlantic, with participation from Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners and Team 8. This round values the port at $800 million, bringing total funding to date to $158 million. The Series C follows the company’s $35 million Series B, led by Accel and Bessemer, announced in May.
Of all the industries that are penetrated by LLM-based technology, coding has the deepest roots. So, naturally, developers are also working on the cutting edge of building and deploying agents that can automate entire repetitive processes. This is more than just asking an AI to write code.
But the problem here, according to Zohar Einy, co-founder and CEO of Port, is that it’s currently a wildland for enterprise developer tools agents, including finding them, sharing them, and making sure their work adheres to company standards.
Developers “want to use AI beyond just coding. They want AI to solve incidents and security issues. They want AI to handle release management,” Aney told TechCrunch.
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But when agents connect to all sorts of different tools and data sources, data is distributed among them, there’s no way to collaborate, and there are no corporate standards or guardrails, “chaos ensues,” his product pitch says.
So Port offers more than just a catalog of development and agent tools (though it does). It provides an orchestration layer with the ability to measure agent performance and optionally add human interaction to the approval process.
A feature called “context lake” defines data sources, context memory, and guardrails for agents. “It’s a place where agents manage what they ‘need to know’ to do their jobs safely and accurately,” Aney explained.
In addition to using Port to catalog agents that developers have already created using other tools, developers can also use Port to create new agents. In addition, Port also offers some of its own off-the-shelf agents that can resolve helpdesk tickets, handle provisioning, and more.
Einy explains that their product handles the remaining 90% of a software programmer’s work beyond writing code. “It provides a user interface for engineers to control the agents, iterate on them, and approve non-coding work. That’s 90% of everything.”
With a huge new war chest, big-name clients, and Tier 1 VCs, Port looks like an agent-managed startup to watch. But it’s safe to say it faces competition.
The entire agent management and orchestration category is full of hopefuls, from large technology companies to startups, all of whom are tackling a variety of emerging problems in the field from different angles. These include LangChain, UiPath, Cortex, and more.
