Palo Alto Networks To Acquire AI Gateway Startup Portkey

The cybersecurity giant plans to utilize Portkey’s capabilities to enable advancements with its AI security platform, Prisma AIRS.

Palo Alto Networks announced Thursday it has reached a deal to acquire Portkey, a startup offering an “AI gateway” for management and protection of autonomous agents.

Terms of the acquisition—which is expected to close during the vendor’s fourth fiscal quarter, ending July 31—were not disclosed.

[Related: Palo Alto Networks CEO: Surging ‘AI Cycle’ Driving Billion-Dollar Acquisitions]

The cybersecurity giant said it plans to utilize Portkey’s capabilities to enable advancements with its AI security platform, Prisma AIRS.

Portkey provides a “critical centralized control plane” for managing and protecting AI agents, which is “already processing trillions of tokens per month with the low latency required for agent-to-agent communication,” Palo Alto Networks said in a news release.

The result is that Portkey can ensure that security governance and software development velocity are not in conflict, the vendor said.

Portkey was founded in 2023 by a team including CEO Rohit Agarwal, formerly director of product management at Freshworks.

The agreement to acquire Portkey extends Palo Alto Networks’ recent string of acquisitions, most notably with the $25 billion acquisition of identity security vendor CyberArk, which was completed in February.

Other recent deals have included the February acquisition deal for “agentic endpoint” startup Koi and the vendor’s $3.35 billion acquisition of observability provider Chronosphere, which closed in late January.