AI apps building platform Portkey raises $15 Mn in Series A led by Elevation

Artificial intelligence apps building platform Portkey has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Elevation Capital, with participation from existing investor Lightspeed. 

Portkey had secured $3 million in a seed funding round led by Lightspeed in August 2023.

The company will use the capital to expand its AI control plane and scale go-to-market operations. The proceeds will be used to enhance support for agent-based systems with additional controls around permissions, identity and budget management, while improving performance for low-latency use cases.

Founded by Rohit Agarwal, Portkey builds a unified control plane for production AI systems. The platform combines an AI gateway with governance, observability, reliability and cost management features. Its system sits in the path of AI traffic and helps enterprises manage model usage, enforce policies and track spending in real time.

According to Portkey, it already processes over 500 billion LLM tokens across 125 million requests per day. The platform manages more than $500,000 in AI spend daily for over 24,000 organisations globally. Its customers include Postman and Snorkel AI.

The firm has also made its core enterprise gateway available for free, aiming to lower the barrier for teams to implement governance and observability controls early in their AI deployments.

In August last year, Elevation Capital launched a new $400 million fund focused on backing companies over the long term, including those preparing for IPOs. For early-stage investments, it continues to deploy capital from Fund VIII, a $670 million vehicle launched in April 2022 that typically invests $2–5 million in startups.