Palo Alto Networks said on 30 April 2026 that it had agreed to acquire Portkey, a startup whose AI gateway sits between a company's applications and the AI models and tools they call, routing, monitoring and controlling that traffic.
The cybersecurity company did not disclose the price or other terms. It said Portkey would become the AI gateway for Prisma AIRS, its platform for securing AI applications and agents, and that it would continue to support existing and new Portkey customers after the deal closed.
Palo Alto Networks had expected the transaction to close in its fiscal fourth quarter, subject to customary conditions. It announced on 29 May that the acquisition had closed, Intelligence Community News reported.
What Portkey built
Portkey offers a central control plane for companies running large language models and autonomous AI agents in production. Through one interface, developers can reach more than 3,000 LLMs and MCP tools, while the gateway handles routing between them, fails over automatically when a model is unavailable and caches responses to cut costs. Palo Alto Networks said customers can reach 99.99% uptime for autonomous workloads this way, and that the gateway processes trillions of tokens a month.
When it raised its Series A in February 2026, Portkey said it had processed more than 500 billion LLM tokens, was handling 125 million requests a day and was managing more than $500,000 of AI spending daily for more than 24,000 organisations, according to Entrepreneur India. Customers named at the time included Postman and Snorkel AI.
Palo Alto Networks also said that the gateway's caching and granular quotas would help customers avoid unexpected AI bills, which it called bill shock, and reduce operating costs. It said Portkey handles communication between agents with low latency.
“Scaling AI in production requires a delicate balance between total flexibility for developers and absolute control for security teams. By joining Palo Alto Networks, we will establish the AI Gateway as the foundational layer of the secure AI enterprise. Together, we will provide the infrastructure that allows every organization to deploy autonomous agents with the confidence that their data and operations are fully protected.”
Why Palo Alto Networks is buying
Palo Alto Networks argues that AI agents, which can take actions on their own across company systems, create a new attack surface that existing security tools were not built to manage. Lee Klarich, its chief product and technology officer, said agents joining the enterprise workforce become a new, unmanaged attack surface, and that Portkey would give companies visibility into all of their agent traffic and the means to control it.
Inside Prisma AIRS, Portkey is to inspect AI traffic and enforce security and governance policies at runtime, apply least-privilege controls to agent interactions through the company's AI identity security product, and provide telemetry and audit logs. It is also meant to offer central management of models, agents and MCP servers, including versioning and access control.
Portkey co-founder and chief executive Rohit Agarwal said running AI in production requires balancing flexibility for developers with control for security teams, and that the deal would make the AI gateway a foundational layer of enterprise AI security.
The founders and the funding
Portkey was founded by Rohit Agarwal and Ayush Garg. It raised a $3 million seed round from Lightspeed in August 2023, and in February 2026 closed a $15 million Series A led by Elevation Capital, with Lightspeed participating again, Entrepreneur India reported. That puts its reported funding at $18 million.
The sale came about ten weeks after that Series A. Neither company said how many Portkey employees would join Palo Alto Networks.
Security vendors move into AI infrastructure
Palo Alto Networks, which reports more than 70,000 customers, has been building Prisma AIRS as its main product for AI security. Buying a gateway that already sits in the path of AI traffic gives it a place to apply its security policies to model calls and agent actions as they happen.
After the deal closed, Agarwal said Portkey had joined Palo Alto Networks to close the trust gap that keeps AI from reaching its full potential, according to Intelligence Community News.
Palo Alto Networks, which is based in Santa Clara, California, and listed on Nasdaq, did not say whether Portkey's gateway would remain available as a separate product.
