Palo Alto Networks is to acquire AI production firm Portkey for further development of its Prisma AIRS suite.

Differing from recent Palo Alto Networks acquisitions such as Koi, Chronosphere, and CyberArk, Portkey is not a security vendor by nature. Instead, it helps users build AI production stacks and control planes that secure AI agentic adoption for enterprises. The solution offers a gateway to more than 3,000 large language models (LLMs), including those from the usual suspects of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and DeepSeek.

Portkey will similarly become the AI gateway for Prisma AIRS. According to Palo Alto Networks, the integration will secure AI interactions by inspecting traffic in real time, enforcing governance policies, and applying strict least-privilege identity controls to protect data and prevent threats. The security giant also promised 99.99% uptime for autonomous workloads through semantic routing and automated failover, while centralizing management of AI models, agents, and model context protocol (MCP) servers with secure versioning and access control.

"As autonomous agents join the enterprise workforce, they also become a new, unmanaged attack surface," Palo Alto Networks CTO Lee Klarich noted. "By integrating Portkey into Prisma AIRS, organizations will be able to confidently deploy and govern AI agents … with visibility into all their agentic traffic, enabling them to control and protect against agentic threats."

"Scaling AI in production requires a delicate balance between total flexibility for developers and absolute control for security teams,” Portkey CEO Rohit Agarwal added. “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.”

Portkey was founded in 2023 by Agarwal and Ayush Garg, veterans of AI-driven content platform Pepper Content. The San Francisco-based firm raised $15 million in a Series A round in February led by Elevation Capital, with participation from Lightspeed.

Before the acquisition, Portkey had already been working with Palo Alto Networks via an integration into Prisma AIRS, which saw AIRS plugged into Portkey’s gateway and observability layer. Palo Alto Networks is also a Portkey client, alongside firms such as Postman, Cyera, and Vistaprint.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, with an expected close in the fourth quarter in fiscal 2026.