Portkey Raises $15M Series A to Scale the Unified Control Plane for Production AI.

Our latest raise enables us to scale the infrastructure layer enterprises need to run AI reliably and accountably

Today we're proud to announce Portkey has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Elevation Capital, with participation from Lightspeed. This investment reflects the industry-wide shift we've been expecting for three years: the moment when AI stops being something companies experiment with and becomes something they depend on.

AI now powers critical functions like customer support, underwriting, coding, and more. The biggest operational challenges of AI have shifted from managing hallucinations and bias, to more fundamental problems:

• API failures that go unnoticed until a customer reports them
• Rate limits that hit the moment a use case starts to scale
• Teams blowing through AI budgets with no visibility or accountability
• Leadership asking "what are we spending on AI?" and getting no clear answer

The spotlight has moved from AI model performance to AI infrastructure, and that’s our mission at Portkey.

How Portkey Powers AI

Portkey is the unified control plane for production AI. It’s a high-performance AI gateway with built-in governance, observability, reliability, and cost management. Sitting directly in the path of AI traffic, Portkey enforces policy in real time, routes traffic intelligently, provides observability across every request, and tracks spend as it happens.

Engineering gets reliability. Finance gets accountability. Leadership gets answers. All from the same control plane.

Watch what happens when the system holds.

Where We Are Today

Over the past three years, we’ve been operating in the critical path of real enterprise AI systems, proving our architecture under live traffic, real governance demands, and the operational pressures that come with AI becoming core infrastructure. And in that time, we’ve proven our production control plane for AI never breaks.

Having proven this architecture at scale, we believe governance and observability shouldn’t be gated by budget. Teams running AI in production need production-grade controls from day one, which is why we are making Portkey basic enterprise gateway available for free.

Why This Matters Now

AI adoption has outpaced operational maturity, meaning companies are running business-critical systems on infrastructure designed for prototypes. And the ecosystem itself is volatile: models deprecate, pricing changes overnight, rate limits appear without warning and agent frameworks evolve faster than internal teams can keep up. 

Enterprises need an infrastructure layer that absorbs that volatility. A system that governs what AI can do, observes what it's doing, and controls what it costs.

What We're Building Next

We’ve already accomplished one of the greatest challenges in the industry: delivering AI that never breaks. This new funding will take Portkey into its next era, focused on three core priorities:

• Expanding go-to-market. The demand from large enterprises, across finance, pharma, technology, and beyond, tells us the market is ready. We're growing our team to meet it.
• Governance for agentic AI. As agents take autonomous action, accessing systems, making decisions, and spending money, organizations need controls. We're building the governance layer: permissions, identity, access boundaries, and budget guardrails.
• Platform infrastructure for scale. Higher-volume workloads. Real-time use cases. Day-zero support for new models and pricing changes. Infrastructure that keeps pace so our customers don't have to.

This funding allows us to scale our reach, invest more deeply in governance for agentic systems, and continue building the platform enterprises rely on as AI becomes central to how they operate. The demand is already here and our focus now is execution at a larger scale.

We are grateful to the customers who trusted us early, to Elevation Capital and Lightspeed for backing this next phase, and to the team whose discipline and speed built the foundation we are now expanding. 

AI will only become more powerful and more pervasive, and our mission at Portkey is to give enterprises the control plane that keeps AI reliable, governed, and accountable as it scales.

— Rohit Agarwal, Co-founder & CEO