Transformative technology like AI agents are limited in their impact without infrastructure that drives robust and trusted automation. Developers building agents face daily challenges in visibility, permissions, authentication, and human coordination—especially in high-stakes sectors or customer-facing applications. “Prompting and praying” is not good enough.

Today, we are excited to announce our investment in Portia AI, a company building an open source SDK and cloud platform that empower engineers to harness the full capabilities of AI agents with all the oversight businesses require. Portia’s human::agent interface ensures that AI agents are predictable, controllable, and human-aware through the power of multi-agent planning. Our team at General Catalyst is exhilarated to partner with such an exceptionally talented pair in Emma Burrows and Mounir Mouawad, whose vision for Portia we believe will shape AI adoption for decades to come.

Designed for Developers, Built for Production

Before the AI renaissance, traditional user and org authentication solutions were effective in countering common threats like brute-force attacks or phishing. Multifactor authentication (MFA) added an extra layer of protection, and single sign-on (SSO) simplified access management. 

As agents come to the fore, these traditional methods create friction and risk, often leading to agent "death loops" where an agent fails repeatedly because it lacks the correct permissions. 

Portia AI’s SDK ensures that developers can create structured multi-agent plans, run them statefully, and loop in humans when desired:

• Their planning agent guides the LLM to produce an explicit plan in response to a prompt. It can be iterated on with the developer or end user to satisfaction and can learn from previous successful plan runs if desired.
• Portia’s execution agents implement the agreed plan statefully and offer developers the ability to define points where they want to take control of plan runs (e.g., to resolve missing information or multiple-choice decisions with a human).
• You can supply Portia with your own tools or load them from any MCP server. Portia also offers a growing library of tools with built-in authentication, which already includes a number of popular SaaS providers (including Google, Slack, Zendesk, and Github).

These features are designed to not only handle complexity but also scale it across production environments where auditability and user experience matter.

A Team Engineered for Scale

What really makes Portia AI stand out to us is the exceptional team behind it. Co-founders Emma Burrows and Mounir Mouawad bring a wealth of experience and a unique blend of skills to this hair-on-fire problem.

Emma's journey in tech is nothing short of inspiring. Before founding Portia AI, she was the CTO of Stripe UK, where she built the London engineering team from the ground up. Before Stripe, she created the e-commerce stack at Charlotte Tilbury, and before that, she spent eight years at Google. Emma is not just a builder; she is a scaler. An accelerant. Her intellectual curiosity is only matched by her desire to avoid fame (unavoidable in the developer community, it seems!).

Fluent in Arabic, French, and English (with a dash of German), Mounir brings a global perspective to Portia AI. His career blends product and business acumen with a passion for making a difference. He led Banking-as-a-Service for Stripe in the UK and EU; the launch and expansion of Google Pay across the EU; and excelled in Amazon’s rotational program. Mounir was also one of the earliest advisory board members of Codebrave.org, which today offers coding education to thousands of underserved youth in Lebanon. Mounir is a magnet for ambition and talent.

What’s Next?

Portia AI recently came out of stealth and is already onboarding design partners. They continue to ship fast, with an emphasis on making their planning agent smarter each day and improving their execution agents’ ability to handle high-volume, low-latency requirements in production.

Portia is not just solving a problem—we believe they are democratizing the ability to build reliable AI agents in production, propelling us into the future of applied AI. We are thrilled to be supporting them on this journey.

To learn more, visit www.portialabs.ai, follow along on LinkedIn, or check out their GitHub repo.