AI application infra startup Portkey raises $15M in Series A round led by Elevation Capital

AI application infrastructure startup Portkey has secured $15 million in a Series A funding round spearheaded by Elevation Capital, with participation from Lightspeed.

In August 2023, the company had raised $3 million in a seed funding round led by Lightspeed.

The capital will be used to strengthen Portkey's AI control plane and expand its go-to-market efforts.

Specifically, Portkey plans to deepen support for agent-driven systems by introducing tighter controls around permissions, identity management, and budget oversight, while also optimising performance for low-latency applications.

Founded by Rohit Agarwal, the company provides a unified control layer for production-grade AI systems. Its offering integrates an AI gateway with tools for governance, observability, reliability, and cost monitoring. Positioned within the flow of AI traffic, the platform enables enterprises to oversee model usage, enforce compliance policies, and monitor spending in real time.

"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," said Rohit Agarwal, Co-founder & CEO, Portkey, in a statement.

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Portkey says it processes more than 500 billion LLM tokens across 125 million daily requests and manages over $500,000 in AI-related spending each day for over 24,000 organisations worldwide. Its clients include Postman and Snorkel AI.

The company has made its core enterprise gateway freely accessible, aiming to help teams adopt governance and observability measures early in their AI implementation journey.

"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," said Agarwal.  

Last August, Elevation Capital introduced a new $400-million fund designed to support companies over the long term, including those preparing for public listings. For early-stage bets, the firm continues to invest through Fund VIII, a $670-million fund launched in April 2022, which typically deploys $2 million–5 million per startup.