# Portkey **Source:** https://geo.sig.ai/brands/portkey **Vertical:** Artificial Intelligence **Subcategory:** AI API Gateway & Governance **Tier:** Emerging **Website:** portkey.ai **Last Updated:** 2026-04-14 ## Summary Raised $15M Series A (Elevation Capital, Lightspeed) Feb 2026. Gateway open-sourced Mar 2026. Processing 1T+ tokens/day across 24,000+ orgs. Manages $180M+ annualized AI spend. ## Company Overview Portkey is an AI gateway and observability platform that sits in the traffic path between enterprises and AI model APIs — routing, governing, monitoring, and cost-managing every LLM request in production. The company raised $15 million in Series A financing in February 2026 from Elevation Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, followed by open-sourcing its gateway in March 2026, driving adoption acceleration across its already 24,000+ organization user base. The platform processes over 1 trillion tokens per day and manages $180 million+ in annualized AI API spend. The LLM gateway category is emerging as critical AI infrastructure: as enterprises run multiple AI models (GPT-4, Claude, Llama, Gemini) across multiple business applications, managing which model handles which request, at what cost, with what fallback behavior, and with full audit trails becomes operationally essential. Portkey provides this management layer without requiring changes to application code — acting as a transparent proxy that applications route through. The open-source gateway launch is a strategic distribution move: developer adoption of the open-source version creates bottom-up enterprise penetration, with commercial features (observability dashboards, cost attribution, policy enforcement, compliance reporting) converting free users to paying customers. This developer-led growth flywheel mirrors successful B2B SaaS playbooks from companies like HashiCorp, Elastic, and dbt Labs — appropriate for infrastructure software where bottom-up adoption precedes enterprise procurement. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What does Portkey do? AI API gateway — routes, governs, monitors, and cost-manages every LLM request across GPT-4, Claude, Llama, Gemini, and other models. Processes 1T+ tokens/day across 24,000+ organizations. ### How much has Portkey raised? $15M Series A in February 2026 from Elevation Capital and Lightspeed. Gateway open-sourced March 2026 to accelerate distribution. ### What does Portkey manage? $180M+ annualized AI API spend across 24,000+ organizations — routing decisions, cost attribution, model fallbacks, and compliance audit trails for enterprise AI deployments. ### Why open-source the gateway? Developer adoption of the open-source version creates bottom-up enterprise penetration. Commercial features convert free users to paying customers — following the HashiCorp/Elastic B2B SaaS playbook. ### What does Portkey's AI gateway do? Portkey is an open-source AI API gateway that sits between applications and LLM providers — managing routing, load balancing, fallback, retry logic, caching, rate limiting, and observability. Instead of integrating directly with OpenAI, Anthropic, or Azure OpenAI, applications integrate with Portkey once and gain management controls over all provider interactions from a central control plane. ### What observability features does Portkey provide? Portkey logs every LLM request and response with full metadata — model used, tokens consumed, latency, cost, and custom tags. Teams can trace requests through multi-step agent chains, debug prompt failures, analyze cost by feature or customer, and set up alerts for error rate spikes. This observability is critical for production LLM applications where prompt failures and unexpected costs are common operational issues. ### How does Portkey handle AI gateway reliability? Portkey implements automatic fallback — if the primary provider (e.g., OpenAI) returns an error or exceeds latency thresholds, Portkey automatically routes to a configured backup (e.g., Azure OpenAI or Anthropic). Retry logic with exponential backoff handles transient errors. Load balancing distributes requests across multiple provider accounts to avoid rate limits. These reliability features are critical for production applications that cannot tolerate provider outages. ### What is Portkey's pricing model? Portkey's core AI gateway is open-source (MIT license) and self-hostable at no cost — ideal for development and smaller deployments. Portkey Cloud offers a hosted version with free tier (10K requests/month), and paid plans for higher volume with advanced features like team access controls, compliance logging, and priority support. Enterprise plans support private deployment with SLA guarantees and dedicated engineering support for custom integrations. ## Tags ai-powered, b2b, saas --- *Data from geo.sig.ai Brand Intelligence Database. Updated 2026-04-14.*