Rohit Agarwal

Rohit Agarwal is co-founder and CEO of Portkey, a control panel for AI apps that combines a gateway to many models with observability and prompt management. He started it in April 2023 with Ayush Garg after years of building AI features at Freshworks and Pepper Content.

Launching Framebench with a BITS Pilani Classmate

Agarwal founded Framebench in March 2012 with Vineet Markan, a fellow BITS Pilani alumnus, according to VCCircle. Its online platform let teams share, review, and comment on videos, images, and documents, and its customers included HBO, Unilever, and Star TV. Freshdesk acquired it for an undisclosed sum.

Building Support Bots on GPT-2 at Freshworks

He led product and AI at Freshworks from 2015 to 2020, according to Inc42. "At Freshworks, we built customer support bots using BERT & GPT-2," he told Pulse 2.0, "and later, at my next company, we built one of the world's first content generation apps on top of GPT-3 in early 2021." That company was Pepper Content, which he told Cerebral Valley quickly scaled to a million users. It was at Pepper, he said, that he realized the DevOps layer for generative AI wasn't mature yet.

Seeing ChatGPT as a Lightbulb Moment

The small internal tools his teams built "would only seem to solve 30-40% of our problems," he told Inc42. He teamed up with Garg, Pepper Content's former director of engineering. "With the release of ChatGPT, we had our lightbulb moment," he told Pulse 2.0. "We realized that the tooling we've been building is exactly the tooling all the other engineers building on top of LLMs will also need." Lightspeed announced its seed investment in August 2023.