British startup Portia AI bags €5 million to help developers build AI agents in production with better human oversight

London-based Portia AI, an open-source AI agents SDK, announced today a €5.1 million funding round to give developers the tools to build production-grade AI agents they can predict, control and authenticate. The round was led by General Catalyst with support from First Minute Capital and Stem AI. “AI engineers with deep expertise painstakingly navigate their […] The post British startup Portia AI bags €5 million to help developers build AI agents in production with better human oversight appeared first on EU-Startups.

Apr 16, 2025 - 16:22

British startup Portia AI bags €5 million to help developers build AI agents in production with better human oversight

London-based Portia AI, an open-source AI agents SDK, announced today a €5.1 million funding round to give developers the tools to build production-grade AI agents they can predict, control and authenticate.

The round was led by General Catalyst with support from First Minute Capital and Stem AI.

“AI engineers with deep expertise painstakingly navigate their way through the challenges of deploying reliable agents in production, but we want to democratise the solutions for all developers,” said Emma Burrows, Portia AI’s Co-founder and CTO.

Co-founded by former Stripe and Google leads Emma Burrows and Mounir Mouawad, Portia AI is an open source SDK to build predictable, controllable and authenticated agents. The core product is accessible on Github and is extensible with their complimentary cloud features which are aimed at making production deployments easier and faster.

Mouawad and Burrows met at Stripe in London. Emma was the CTO of Stripe UK, where she built the London engineering team from the ground up. She also built the e-commerce stack at Charlotte Tilbury. Mounir led several product expansions in EMEA, including leading bank-as-a-service at Stripe and launching Google Pay in 30 markets.

Portia AI came out of stealth in March 2025 and has begun signing design partners and growing its developer following. With this funding round, they’re building out their developer team and working to release a number of new features throughout the rest of this year in their journey to making more reliable production agents.

According to Portia AI, AI agents are attractive because they leverage LLM reasoning to offer a degree of autonomous decision making, while also being able to interact with apps and data sources. Yet many pilot projects have fallen short of moving to production because they lack preemptive visibility into agents behaviour.

Without the ability to monitor progress, intervene when needed, or securely authenticate agents into existing applications, teams are left with limited control. These limitations are especially critical in regulated industries such as Financial Services, or in end-user-facing applications where compliance, auditability, and trust are non-negotiable.

“By seamlessly integrating AI agents, external tools, and human input – and by tackling challenges like JIT authorization head-on – we believe Portia AI is paving the way for a new era of intelligent automation,” said Juliet Bailin, Partner at General Catalyst. “It also cannot be understated how brilliantly positioned Emma and Mounir are to build a generational company. Their vision is expansive, and they are well known among developers and business leaders alike for their ingenuity. We are exhilarated to be working alongside them.”

Mouawad adds “Companies want to build products and processes on agents that feel like transparent, collaborative partners rather than black boxes”.

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