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ByNN Desk
Portkey Heads to Palo Alto Networks in Latest India-to-Global AI Exit
The startup, backed by Elevation Capital and Lightspeed, will become the agentic AI gateway inside Palo Alto's Prisma AIRS platform.
The startup, backed by Elevation Capital and Lightspeed, will become the agentic AI gateway inside Palo Alto’s Prisma AIRS platform.
Cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks has announced plans to acquire Portkey, an Indian-origin AI infrastructure startup, in a move aimed at hardening enterprise defenses against the rising security risks posed by autonomous AI agents.
The California-based company will fold Portkey into its Prisma AIRS platform, where the startup’s technology will operate as a centralized AI gateway responsible for monitoring, routing and securing AI traffic across enterprise environments.
Founded in Bengaluru and now headquartered in San Francisco, Portkey builds software that helps developers and enterprises design, deploy and manage AI applications and autonomous agents in production. The platform handles trillions of tokens every month with low latency, a critical requirement for real-time agent-to-agent communication. Its capabilities include runtime inspection of AI traffic, identity-based controls over agent behavior, semantic routing, automated failover and detailed telemetry for audit and oversight.
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Lee Klarich, chief product and technology officer at Palo Alto Networks, framed the acquisition as a response to a new category of enterprise risk. He said autonomous agents joining the workforce create an unmanaged attack surface, and that integrating Portkey into Prisma AIRS would give organizations visibility into agentic traffic along with the controls needed to defend against agentic threats.
Rohit Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Portkey, said scaling AI in production demands a balance between developer flexibility and the control security teams require. He added that the combined offering would let organizations deploy autonomous agents while keeping data and operations protected.
The deal lands less than two and a half months after Portkey closed a $15 million Series A round led by Elevation Capital and Lightspeed. The startup had previously raised $3 million in a Lightspeed-led seed round in August 2023.
Palo Alto Networks said the acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2026, and that it will continue supporting Portkey’s existing customer base after the transaction completes.
The move underscores a broader shift in enterprise security thinking: as organizations move past copilots and assistants toward autonomous systems with deep access to internal and external workflows, the attack surface is no longer just human users or endpoints, it is the agents themselves.
Disclaimer: This news is based on publicly available information. NervNow has not verified it independently.
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