Portkey

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.

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

Product category

AI Gateway

NAICS

Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (518)

SIC

Communications Services, Nec (4899)

akta.pro industry

PRIMARYHDAFAHAH

API Gateway & Application Gateway (L7 Routing/Policy)

Hardware, Technology & Telecom/Networking Equipment & Components/Load Balancing & Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Keywords

• AI gateway software
• LLM observability platform
• LLM orchestration platform
• AI guardrails platform
• Prompt management platform

Headquarters

HQ city

San Francisco

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Personnel, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations

Revenue model

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

Go-to-market motion4 records

Distribution channels5 records

Marketing channels9 records

Core 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.

Named customers20 records

Segments5 records

Ideal customer profiles4 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration29 records

AI capability12 records

Feature11 records

Partnerships

Ten partnerships are on record, tiered flagship and core.

• Palo Alto NetworksflagshipStrategic or Co-development Partner · 30 April 2026Announced 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.
• MongoDBcoreTechnology or Integration · 1 September 2024Joint 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.
• AporiacoreTechnology or Integration · 31 July 2024Announced 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.
• LangChaincoreTechnology or IntegrationPortkey 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.
• CrewAIcoreTechnology or IntegrationNative 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)coreTechnology or IntegrationNative production-grade integration with Microsoft's AutoGen agent framework documented in Portkey's Agents blog and docs.
• LlamaIndexcoreTechnology or IntegrationNative integration with LlamaIndex documented in Portkey's agents framework listing (pip install examples).
• Microsoft (Azure OpenAI / Bedrock on Azure)coreTechnology or IntegrationMicrosoft 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.
• AnthropiccoreTechnology or IntegrationAnthropic 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.
• OpenAIcoreTechnology or IntegrationOpenAI 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

Market position

Competitive moat6 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/PortkeyAI
• GitHubgithub.com/portkey-ai
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/portkey-ai

Compliance4 records

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles2 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds3 records

Investors5 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Portkey