Pitch Deck: AI Startup Requesty Raises $3M, Helps Devs Build on LLMs

Leaders across industries are encouraging employees to increase their AI usage — but it’s becoming costly, and there are risks as people upload sensitive information into an array of large language models.

Requesty wants to help companies bring down the expense and mitigate against any AI perils.

Originally founded as a data analytics startup, London-based Requesty pivoted this year to focus on infrastructure. Its technology sits as a gateway between AI providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Grok, and developers who are building AI-powered applications for tasks like coding, booking travel, scanning invoices, and translation.

Thibault Jaigu, Requesty’s cofounder, describes the company as a kind of Cloudflare — an internet infrastructure and security company — for the AI era. Requesty wants to act as the central pillar connecting different AI servers.

A typical pain point for companies is that engineers have different preferences for the AIs they want to use. They often configure several different models without centralized governance or control around their usage.

“The admins — which is IT security or DevOps — don’t understand what the engineers are using, why they’re using it that way, and what the potential risks are,” Jaigu said.

Risks could include sending customer and other proprietary data to the AI or not revoking a developer’s access key after they leave the company.

Requesty aims to centralize these controls — such as spending limits and API access — across multiple AIs.

Requesty says another benefit of having a unified system is that it can help developer teams better optimize between different providers. If OpenAI is down one day, for example, it can route requests through Anthropic instead.

Requesty also says it can save companies money by using a technique called “prompt caching,” which stores frequently used prompts and reuses them.

In the four months since its pivot, Requesty said its platform is being used by more than 25,000 developers at AI app-building companies, including Mozart AI and Blue Morpho. The company said it has passed $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue.

AI gateway platforms are a newly emerging category in the startup space, creating an infrastructure layer between AI providers and the developers who build on them. Other similar startups in the space include Humanloop, whose cofounders and senior team were acqui-hired by Anthropic last month.

Requesty announced on Friday that it had raised a $3 million seed investment round, led by 20VC and with participation from venture capital firms Tapestry VC, Insiders Ventures, and Tiny Supercomputer.

Jaigu said Requesty intends to use the funds to staff up. It has a head count of five people that it plans to grow to around 15 to 20 next year, hiring primarily across its engineering and growth teams.

Check out the pitch deck Requesty used to secure its $3 million seed investment, shared exclusively with Business Insider. Some of the slides have been omitted or redacted.