A startup built by an Indian founder is now core infrastructure inside one of the world’s biggest cybersecurity companies.
Palo Alto Networks has acquired Portkey, co-founded by Rohit Agarwal — a BITS Pilani graduate who worked at Freshworks in India before building Portkey in the US. The deal closed May 29, 2026.
What Portkey does
As AI moves from chatbots to autonomous agents that execute tasks and access systems independently, enterprises lose track of what those agents are doing and what they’re spending. Portkey sits between a company’s applications and its AI models — routing traffic, tracking costs, and catching problems in real time. It was processing over one trillion tokens daily before the acquisition.
Why Palo Alto bought it
AI agents with system access are a security risk. They can be manipulated, misconfigured, or simply run out of control. Palo Alto wants security at the gateway level. Portkey already operates there, at enterprise scale. Building that internally would have taken years.
Why it matters here
Agarwal built critical enterprise infrastructure — not a consumer app, not a services business — and sold it to a Nasdaq-listed giant that now depends on it. For foreign companies scaling AI across India GCCs and capability centres, the technology now inside Prisma AIRS is directly relevant as a control layer for managing AI deployments.
What changes
Portkey becomes the AI Gateway inside Prisma AIRS, alongside agent identity security and observability tools already on the platform. One system. One place to manage, govern, and secure all enterprise AI activity.
Palo Alto Networks is listed on Nasdaq and headquartered in Santa Clara. Portkey was founded in 2023 by Rohit Agarwal and Ayush Garg.
