Portia AI receives 4.4 million pounds for controllable AI agents

General Catalyst funding to accelerate open source platform for production-ready agents

London, April 16, 2025 - London-based startup Portia AI has secured 4.4 million pounds (approx. 5.1 million euros) in a funding round. The round is led by General Catalyst, with First Minute Capital and Stem AI also participating. The capital is intended to accelerate the further development of the open source technology and an associated cloud platform that developers can use to create and control AI agents for productive use.

Technology for better control in agent development

Portia AI offers an open source SDK (Software Development Kit) for the development of AI agents based on large language models (LLMs). The aim is to make these agents more predictable, controllable and safe to integrate into existing systems. The platform is aimed at developers who want to use autonomous agents not only in pilot projects, but also in real, productive applications.

Many of these projects have so far failed due to a lack of control: developers often have no clear insight into the behavior of agents, cannot intervene in time or encounter problems with secure integration into applications. These challenges are a particular obstacle to their use in regulated industries such as finance or when dealing with end customer data.

Strong focus on security, authorization and collaboration

Portia AI relies on a combination of open source technology and cloud-based functions. These should make it possible to better monitor the use of agents, authorize access in real time and integrate human input in a targeted manner. The aim is to develop AI agents that do not act like opaque "black boxes", but like transparent and reliable partners.

Many companies want to work with AI agents, but they need tools that enable control and trust

Mounir Mouawad, Co-Founder and CEO Portia AI

CTO Emma Burrows adds: "We want to provide solutions that not only work for specialized AI teams, but are accessible to all developers."

Experienced founding duo with Stripe and Google backgrounds

The founders of Portia AI, Emma Burrows and Mounir Mouawad, have extensive experience in the tech industry. Both previously worked at Stripe - Emma as CTO of Stripe UK and Mounir as head of international product expansion. Other positions include Google Pay and Charlotte Tilbury's e-commerce platform.

Portia AI only officially emerged from the stealth phase in March 2025. Since then, the start-up has already gained its first design partners and built up a growing developer community. Portia AI plans to use the fresh capital to expand its development team and release new functions over the course of the year. The aim is to enable companies worldwide to use reliable, traceable AI agents in the production environment.