Portkey
Portkey provides an open-source AI Gateway and control plane for production LLM deployments, unifying access to 1,600+ models with observability, guardrails, governance, and prompt management. The platform serves 24,000+ organizations and was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in May 2026.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2023
- HeadquartersSan Francisco, United States
- Headcount11–50
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What Portkey does
Portkey is a unified control plane for production AI, providing an open-source AI Gateway and integrated governance, observability, and security stack for organizations deploying large language models and AI agents at scale. Founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco with roots in Bengaluru, the company built its core offering as middleware that sits between applications and 1,600+ LLMs across providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS Bedrock, Mistral, DeepSeek, etc.), exposing them through a single REST API and adding reliability features (load balancing, fallbacks, retries, semantic caching), observability (40+ OpenTelemetry-compatible metrics, traces, logs), 60+ AI guardrails (PII redaction, prompt-injection detection, JSON validation, partner evaluators), hierarchical RBAC, virtual-key vaults, prompt management, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) Gateway for agent-tool governance. The platform is available as a hosted SaaS, private cloud/VPC deployment, or fully open-source self-host, and has scaled to serve 24,000+ organizations processing 2+ trillion LLM tokens daily and routing $180M in annualized AI spend.
Portkey monetizes through a tiered, usage-based model: a free Developer tier (10,000 recorded logs/month) for self-serve adoption, a Production subscription at $49/month plus $9 per 100k overage for growing teams, and custom-priced Enterprise contracts (10M+ logs/month) with SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance, private cloud/VPC hosting, and dedicated onboarding. Go-to-market combines product-led growth (free tier, open-source GitHub repo with 12.2k+ stars, public real-time rankings dashboard) with enterprise field sales targeting Fortune 500 customers in financial services, pharmaceuticals, and technology, plus a community-led motion through native integrations with LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, ControlFlow, and Phidata. The company raised a $3M seed (Aug 2023, Lightspeed India) and a $15M Series A (Feb 2026, Elevation Capital), and was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in May 2026 at an estimated $120-140M valuation to serve as the AI Gateway within PANW's Prisma AIRS platform.
Portkey firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Portkey
- Legal name
- Portkey, Inc.
- Website
- https://portkey.ai
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2023
- Operating status
- Acquired
- Headcount range
- 11–50 employees
- Short description
- Portkey provides an open-source AI Gateway and control plane for production LLM deployments, unifying access to 1,600+ models with observability, guardrails, governance, and prompt management. The platform serves 24,000+ organizations and was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in May 2026.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Portkey industry classification
Industry- Product category
- AI Gateway
- NAICS
- Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (518)
- SIC
- Communications Services, Nec (4899)
- akta.pro primary industry
- API Gateway & Application Gateway (L7 Routing/Policy) (HDAFAHAH)
Keywords
Where Portkey is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- San Francisco
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices1 record
Markets served
Portkey business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Technology or R&D, Personnel, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations
Revenue model
- Developer (Freemium) tier: Free-forever tier with 10,000 recorded logs per month; no overage allowed; 3-day log retention, 30-day metric retention; deterministic guardrails only; community support. Used as a top-of-funnel entry point for self-serve adoption.
- Production subscription: Usage-based subscription at $49/month including 100,000 recorded logs, plus $9 per additional 100k requests up to 3M; 30-day log retention, 90-day metric retention; LLM and partner guardrails; RBAC, service account API keys, production support; semantic caching enabled.
- Enterprise custom contract: Custom-priced annual contracts for organizations with 10M+ recorded logs/month; SSO, granular budget/rate limits, advanced compliance (SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA), custom BAAs, private cloud/VPC hosting, dedicated onboarding and priority support.
- Open-source self-hosted distribution: Free open-source deployment of the AI Gateway (`npx @portkey-ai/gateway`) generating goodwill, community contributions, developer mindshare, and a funnel into paid hosted tiers; not a direct revenue stream but a key adoption vector.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Monthly | Developer: Free forever, 10k logs/month |
| Subscription | Monthly | Production: $49/month, 100k logs/month + $9 overage per 100k |
| Subscription | Annual | Enterprise: Custom pricing, 10M+ logs/month |
| Other | Pay-as-you-go | Open Source self-host: free software, infrastructure costs $2k-$3.5k/month |
Go-to-market motion4 records
Distribution channels5 records
Marketing channels9 records
Portkey product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Portkey operates an open-source AI Gateway that provides a unified REST API fronting 1,600+ LLMs across providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS Bedrock, Mistral, etc.), bundled with full-stack observability, 60+ AI guardrails, prompt management, an MCP Gateway for Model Context Protocol servers, and enterprise governance (RBAC, virtual keys, budget controls). The platform is delivered as hosted SaaS, private cloud, VPC, or self-hosted open-source deployment, and was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in May 2026 to become the AI Gateway within the Prisma AIRS platform.
Product overview
Portkey's offering is a unified, open-source AI control-plane platform branded as the "Production Stack for Gen AI Builders." The core platform is the Portkey AI Gateway, which sits as middleware between applications and 1,600+ LLMs, and is bundled with eight tightly integrated modules: Observability, Guardrails, Prompt Engineering Studio, Agents, MCP Gateway, Security & Compliance, Model Catalog, and RBAC-based governance. These modules are sold as tiered plans (Developer free, Production $49/month, Enterprise custom) and are also available as a fully open-source self-hosted deployment. Following Palo Alto Networks' completed acquisition in May 2026, the entire stack now also serves as the AI Gateway inside the Prisma AIRS platform, giving enterprise customers unified traffic inspection, governance, identity controls, and runtime security across agents and LLM workloads.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Products and services
- Portkey AI Gateway Centralized, open-source AI gateway that routes requests to 1,600+ LLMs via a unified API, with conditional routing, automatic fallbacks, retries, load balancing, semantic caching, batching, fine-tuning, multimodal support, and request timeouts. Powers 3,000+ GenAI teams.
- Portkey Observability OpenTelemetry-compatible observability suite providing full-stack LLM visibility — logs, traces, metadata, custom filters, feedback, auto-instrumentation, FinOps cost analytics, and alerts across 40+ performance metrics.
- Portkey Guardrails Real-time AI guardrails system running 60+ built-in checks (deterministic and AI-based) for PII redaction, prompt-injection blocking, JSON validation, regex matching, content filtering, embedding guardrails, and partner-guardrail integrations with zero added latency.
- Prompt Engineering Studio Collaborative IDE for creating, version-controlling, testing, and deploying prompts across 1,600+ models with side-by-side comparison, parallel testing, deployment labels/rollbacks, templating, and shared libraries. Awarded #2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt.
- Portkey Agents Production-grade agent offering that natively integrates Portkey's gateway, guardrails, and observability with LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, ControlFlow, and Phidata, enabling reliable AI agents with error handling across any LLM.
- MCP Gateway Unified control plane for the Model Context Protocol that centralizes authentication, access control, observability, registry, and policy enforcement for MCP servers and tools, with OAuth 2.1, API tokens, header auth, and IdP integration (Okta, Entra).
- Security & Compliance Enterprise-grade security layer providing virtual keys, RBAC, IP/Geo access controls, PII redaction, and adherence to SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA standards, with private cloud, VPC, and self-hosted deployment options.
- Model Catalog Centralized governance layer for managing access to 1,600+ LLMs across the organization, with org-level provider integrations, workspace-scoped budgets and rate limits, model provisioning, and a unified Model Garden view.
Companies that use Portkey
Customer profileNamed customers20 records
Segments5 records
Ideal customer profiles4 records
Portkey technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration29 records
AI capability12 records
Feature11 records
Portkey partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Ten partnerships are on record, tiered flagship and core.
- Palo Alto NetworksflagshipAnnounced intent to acquire Portkey on April 30, 2026 and completed the acquisition on May 28-29, 2026 for an estimated $120-140M. Portkey is integrated as the core AI Gateway within Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS platform, providing a unified control plane for securing and governing AI agents at scale, supporting 3,000+ LLMs and processing trillions of tokens monthly.
- MongoDBcoreJoint integration between Portkey's open-source AI Gateway and MongoDB's flexible, scalable database platform for storing and managing AI-generated logs, telemetry, and vector embeddings; case study with Quizizz demonstrated 100% visibility, 99.99% uptime, and 40+ real-time AI metrics using the combined stack.
- AporiacoreAnnounced partnership to bring Aporia's secure and reliable AI guardrails to production through Portkey's AI Gateway; Aporia is listed as a partner guardrail integration on Portkey's Guardrails page.
- LangChaincorePortkey natively integrates with LangChain/LangGraph as one of its flagship agent framework integrations, enabling developers to swap providers via a single `base_url` change and benefit from unified traces, observability, and guardrails across LLM calls.
- CrewAIcoreNative production-grade integration with the CrewAI agent framework, enabling AI teams to route CrewAI agent LLM calls through Portkey's gateway with full observability, caching, and guardrails.
- AutoGen (Microsoft)coreNative production-grade integration with Microsoft's AutoGen agent framework documented in Portkey's Agents blog and docs.
- LlamaIndexcoreNative integration with LlamaIndex documented in Portkey's agents framework listing (pip install examples).
- Microsoft (Azure OpenAI / Bedrock on Azure)coreMicrosoft Azure is a deeply integrated provider across Portkey's stack: Azure OpenAI models are accessible via the Universal API, Azure is a guardrail partner, and Portkey offers end-to-end Azure integration documented at portkey.ai/docs/integrations/cloud/azure.
- AnthropiccoreAnthropic Claude models (including Claude Sonnet and Opus variants) are accessible via Portkey's Universal API; the rankings page shows anthropic as the leading token and spend provider routed through Portkey.
- OpenAIcoreOpenAI models (GPT family including GPT-5.4/5.5, o1-preview, o1-mini, GPT-4o) are accessible via Portkey's Universal API and OpenAI real-time API; OpenAI is the largest provider by spend on Portkey's rankings dashboard.
Scale indicators9 records
Recent moves6 records
Expansion highlights6 records
Portkey competitors and assessment
Company assessmentMarket position
Competitive moat6 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
Portkey social profiles
Digital presencePortkey compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance4 records
Portkey financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Portkey leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles2 records
Portkey funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds3 records
Investors5 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Portkey M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Portkey
What does Portkey do?
Portkey operates an open-source AI Gateway that provides a unified REST API fronting 1,600+ LLMs across providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS Bedrock, Mistral, etc.), bundled with full-stack observability, 60+ AI guardrails, prompt management, an MCP Gateway for Model Context Protocol servers, and enterprise governance (RBAC, virtual keys, budget controls). The platform is delivered as hosted SaaS, private cloud, VPC, or self-hosted open-source deployment, and was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in May 2026 to become the AI Gateway within the Prisma AIRS platform.
Is Portkey a public or private company?
Portkey is a private company. It is classified as corporate owned and is currently acquired.
When was Portkey founded?
Portkey was founded in 2023. It employs 11 to 50 people.
Where is Portkey based?
Portkey is headquartered in San Francisco, United States, in the North America region.
How does Portkey make money?
Four revenue lines are on record. Developer (Freemium) tier is the primary driver. The others are production subscription, enterprise custom contract and open-source self-hosted distribution.
Does Portkey have an API?
Yes. Portkey provides a unified REST API via its AI Gateway that lets developers route, manage, and observe requests to 1,600+ LLMs across providers. The gateway is accessed with just three lines of code, requires only a Portkey API key, and supports Node.js, Python, OpenAI JS, OpenAI Python, and cURL clients. The API exposes chat completions, embeddings, fine-tuning, batching, virtual key management, budget/limit enforcement, guardrail checks, and prompt management endpoints. It is available as hosted SaaS, private cloud, VPC, or fully self-hosted via 'npx @portkey-ai/gateway'. A Model Context Protocol (MCP) Gateway is also offered as part of the platform. Developer documentation is at portkey.ai/docs.
What industry is Portkey in?
Portkey's product category is AI Gateway. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAFAHAH, API Gateway & Application Gateway (L7 Routing/Policy). Its NAICS code is 518 and its SIC code is 4899.