Respan GTM brain

category

market profile

• text: Production AI applications need routing, fallback and cost controls across models alongside visibility into agent behavior.
• text: Respan combines gateway infrastructure with tracing, evaluation and prompt management, serving startups and enterprise teams.

personas

• title: AI application engineer
  pains:

  • Must debug multi-step agent failures and trace prompts, tool calls and model outputs.
  • Needs to switch model providers without rewriting application integrations.
• title: ML platform or infrastructure lead
  pains:

  • Provider outages and latency affect production reliability.
  • Token spend, rate limits and sensitive data require centralized controls.
• title: Engineering leader at a voice AI company
  pains:

  • Needs high-volume model calls to remain reliable while teams investigate quality and cost regressions.

icp

• text: Startups shipping customer-facing LLM agents, including voice AI, AI CRM and agent memory products.
• text: Engineering teams with multiple model providers and production traffic requiring observability and evaluation.
• text: Larger organizations requiring custom SLAs, self-hosting or HIPAA agreements.

message pillars

• text: Use a unified gateway for a wide model selection.
• text: See model calls and diagnose agent behavior.
• text: Improve production quality through evaluation.
• text: Maintain availability when model providers fail.

objections

• objection: Will gateway integration require rewriting our app?
  response: Respan shows OpenAI and Anthropic SDK configurations with changed base URLs; validate compatibility with your own workload.
• objection: Can we test the product before a sales process?
  response: The free plan includes a limited allocation of logs, scores and evaluators without a credit card.
• objection: Can sensitive deployments meet enterprise requirements?
  response: The enterprise tier lists self-hosting and HIPAA BAA options; assess terms and coverage with the vendor.

competitors

• name: LiteLLM
  why: Open-source LLM gateway and proxy with model routing.
• name: Portkey
  why: AI gateway with observability and guardrails.
• name: Helicone
  why: Combines LLM observability with a gateway and fallback capabilities.
• name: OpenRouter
  why: Unified model access and token routing competing for gateway traffic.

keywords

• open source AI gateway
• LLM observability
• agent tracing
• LLM evaluations platform
• LLM fallback routing
• AI gateway cost optimization
• production agent monitoring

voice

• Technical and developer-first
• Performance-oriented
• Direct and confident

signals

• text: Team has AI agents in production and needs to debug traces or evaluate quality.
• text: Usage of multiple providers creates reliability, latency or token-spend management concerns.

stack

• Rust
• OpenAI SDK
• Anthropic SDK
• OpenTelemetry
• LangChain
• PostHog

pricing

motion

channels

• GitHub
• developer documentation
• SEO
• developer communities
• direct sales

confidence

Founders

• name: Andy Li
  title: Founder/CEO
  role: CEO
  bio: Founder @ Respan - Open-source, extensible AI gateway with observability and evals. https://github.com/respanai/respan-gateway Previously @ UIUC (dropped out) and Apple Product Design.