Portkey raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Elevation Capital, with participation from Lightspeed, to scale its unified control plane for production AI. The company now processes 500 billion tokens daily across 24,000+ organizations, managing $180 million in annualized AI spend—highlighting the infrastructure chasm that has emerged as AI transitions from experimental tool to business-critical system.

The timing reflects an industry inflection point where AI adoption has outpaced operational maturity. Companies are running mission-critical functions like customer support, underwriting, and coding on infrastructure originally designed for prototypes, creating reliability and governance gaps that traditional cloud platforms weren’t built to address.