Krrish Dholakia

Krrish Dholakia is co-founder of LiteLLM (BerriAI), the open-source LLM gateway that translates calls across providers into a single OpenAI-shaped interface. With Ishaan Jaffer he turned production pain from their own chatbot into a package now widely starred on GitHub and used as both SDK and proxy server.

When if/else for models exploded

In LiteLLM's YC Launch post, Jaffer described adding Azure and Cohere fallbacks until provider-specific branches made debugging miserable. The pair abstracted completion and embedding calls behind one package that normalizes inputs, exceptions, and outputs. Dholakia shows up across GitHub, Discord, and LinkedIn as the public maintainer face asking developers what providers to add next.

Seed and the gateway habit

BerriAI raised a $1.6M seed from Y Combinator, Gravity Fund, and Pioneer Fund. The product lines stay close to the original job: a Python SDK, a FastAPI proxy, spend and logging hooks, and a UI for mapping model aliases without redeploying application code. Enterprise names appear in marketing, but the center of gravity is still open-source adoption.

On simplifying the model zoo

Public writing treats multi-provider complexity as a tax that should not sit in every app's business logic. Dholakia's posts celebrate when coverage of the LLM zoo expands and when teams can swap models behind a stable interface - a builder ethic more than a vertical AI pitch.