Global cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks has acquired Elevation Capital-backed AI gateway and observability start-up Portkey. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Palo Alto Networks’ fiscal year 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.
Portkey equips teams with tools for deploying AI in production, offering an AI gateway, observability, guardrails, governance and prompt management capabilities.
Commenting on the acquisition, Portkey co-founder and CEO Rohit Agarwal said, “By joining Palo Alto Networks, we aim to establish the AI Gateway as the foundational layer of the secure AI enterprise. Together, we will provide the infrastructure that allows organisations to deploy autonomous agents with confidence, ensuring their data and operations remain fully protected.”
Reflecting on the journey, co-founder Ayush Garg took to LinkedIn, “We built the AI Gateway before there was even a category for it. We often found ourselves explaining what an AI Gateway was in early meetings. But we kept going, driven by a shared belief that it was better to take that risk together than play it safe.”
“Over the past year, that conviction has started to pay off. What began as a tool teams experimented with has evolved into a critical layer powering AI systems, handling billions of calls. Customers are now trusting their production workloads to our platform. The uncertainty hasn’t disappeared, but it has transformed into a realisation, this is much bigger than we initially imagined,” he added.
Portkey was founded in 2023 by BITS Pilani alumnus Rohit Agarwal and SRM Chennai alumnus Ayush Garg. The start-up is backed by Elevation Capital and Lightspeed and raised $15 million in a funding round led by Elevation Capital in February, as per market intelligence platform Tracxn.
Published on May 1, 2026