Rohit Agarwal

Rohit Agarwal is co-founder and CEO of Portkey, an LLMOps platform for routing, governing, and watching generative AI in production. He came up through Indian SaaS - Framebench, Freshworks, Pepper - and started Portkey with Ayush Garg after watching LLM apps break the moment traffic and cost got real.

Framebench to Freshworks to Pepper

After BITS Pilani he founded Framebench, a creative collaboration tool later acquired by Freshworks. At Freshworks he led product on Freshdesk, then moved to Pepper Content, where early GPT-3 experiments on Peppertype showed both the upside and the operational mess of shipping generative features. In a Lightspeed note on the seed, that path is the origin story for Portkey: the founders kept hitting production gaps they could not buy.

Building Portkey as an LLM control plane

Portkey launched as a gateway and observability layer - one place to swap models, cache, log, and put guardrails around LLM calls. Announcing the seed, Agarwal described tech leaders drowning in competing AI requests they could not safely approve. The product thesis stayed practical: help teams move from proof-of-concept to something that survives rate limits, invoices, and audit questions. Lightspeed led the 2023 seed; Elevation Capital led a Series A in February 2026.

On production AI without heroics

In podcasts and press he keeps returning to reliability and cost as the boring work that decides whether AI features stay shipped. A Pulse2 interview frames Portkey as developer tooling for enterprises that need GenAI without reinventing ops for every model vendor.