Portal26, a leading GenAI adoption management platform, announced a $9 million Series A funding round led by Shasta Ventures to accelerate product innovation and scale its enterprise governance capabilities.
The round also included participation from Fusion Fund and the venture capital arm of a Fortune 500 financial services institution, bringing the company’s total capital raised to $15 million since its seed funding in 2022.
The Los Gatos-based company, founded and led by CEO Arti Raman, addresses a critical gap in enterprise AI management. As organizations rapidly deploy generative AI across operations, they face growing challenges: lack of visibility into AI tool usage, security vulnerabilities, compliance risks, and difficulty measuring return on investment.
Portal26 solves these problems by providing enterprises with a unified platform to discover, secure, and optimize generative AI adoption across the organization
Enterprise adoption of generative AI has accelerated, but most companies lack centralized control and visibility into how employees use these tools. Employees experiment with ChatGPT, Claude, and other public AI services without proper governance, creating what Portal26 calls “Shadow AI”, undiscovered and unsecured generative AI usage that poses compliance, security, and intellectual property risks.
Raman, whose background includes over 20 years in cybersecurity and risk management at companies like Symantec, built Portal26 to address this exact challenge.
“As enterprises across the world invest in Generative AI, they understand that a platform to manage and measure all aspects of AI adoption is essential to fully realize the potential of this transformative technology,” Raman stated. “We built Portal26 to provide the visibility, security, governance, and strategic analytics necessary for companies to manage their transition for the new normal of how work gets done in the enterprise.”
Comprehensive Capabilities
Portal26’s GenAI platform delivers several critical capabilities in a unified system. The platform provides real-time Shadow AI detection, discovering all generative AI tools employees use, whether public, private, or licensed. It analyzes employee interactions with these tools, examining prompts, attachments, and usage patterns to understand intent and identify valuable use cases.
The platform’s forensic vault represents a differentiator in the market. It is the industry’s only NIST FIPS 140-2 certified encrypted vault for storing complete GenAI transactions. This certification ensures that enterprises can conduct comprehensive audits, compliance reporting, and forensic investigations with full auditability. When risky activity is detected, Portal26 can automatically instruct firewalls to block affected applications while sending incident data to security investigation tools.
Beyond security, Portal26 enables organizations to extract business value from GenAI adoption. The platform analyzes which use cases generate genuine productivity gains, performs risk-value analysis across different AI tools, and enables accurate ROI measurement and GenAI investment decisions.
Portal26 has achieved notable momentum since the launch of its GenAI adoption management platform two years ago. The company reports monitoring hundreds of thousands of enterprise GenAI users and maintaining exceptionally high customer trust.
Critically, a vast majority of Portal26’s enterprise customers have made large multi-year commitments of up to seven figures, indicating strong confidence in both the current platform and its roadmap.
“As the first and leading GenAI adoption management platform, its innovative approach to finding GenAI in the enterprise, securing it, and enabling measurable ROI, is a great example of the kind of leadership and creativity we seek to back. We look forward to helping Portal26 continue to build something extraordinary and sustain its strong growth,” said Jacob Mullins, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures.
Lu Zhang, Founder and Managing Partner of Fusion Fund, added: “This round comes at a time when Portal26 has a mature, enterprise-grade solution that monitors hundreds of thousands of enterprise GenAI users. With exceptionally high customer trust and excellent support from ecosystem partners, Portal26 is poised for strong growth.”
Landscape and Growth
Arti Raman brings substantial credibility to Portal26’s mission. Before founding the company, she spent years at Symantec leading product strategy and UX for the enterprise business while establishing the company’s competitive intelligence function.
Her recognition as a Top Ten Women CEO Shaping the Future of Tech and her nomination for Cyber Person of the Year demonstrate her prominence in the cybersecurity and AI governance sectors.
Raman’s vision for Portal26 extends beyond security infrastructure. She emphasizes building a platform that enables organizations to extract maximum value from generative AI while maintaining security and compliance guardrails. This balance has resonated with enterprise customers evaluating multiple governance solutions.
Portal26 operates in an increasingly competitive market. CrowdStrike’s $260 million acquisition of Pangea Inc., an AI application governance startup, signals the market’s eye on larger technology companies.
However, Portal26’s comprehensive approach, combining Shadow AI detection, forensic capabilities, use case analysis, and ROI measurement in a unified platform positions it distinctly against point solutions focused on specific aspects of AI governance.
The company announced plans to deepen key partnerships across security, systems integrator, reseller, and hyperscaler ecosystems, indicating a strategy to scale through channel partners rather than direct sales alone.
Portal26 will use its Series A funding to improve product features and add new capabilities. The focus includes better AI discovery, tools to boost productivity, ways to measure cost savings, and enhanced reporting.
