Portal26 is a company focused on helping large organizations adopt and manage generative AI in a secure, governed, and optimized way. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Portal26 CEO Arti Raman to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Arti Raman’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Raman said:
“Portal26 was founded by enterprise technology and cybersecurity leaders who recognized that generative enterprise AI adoption required proactive governance and its own purpose-built security that did not exist at the time. The three co-founders had all worked in Sr. product management and engineering at companies like Symantec, DataRobot and Verizon and had experience in creating and building products that would meet unmet needs of the marketplace.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Raman shared:
“After the launch of ChatGPT in November of 2022, we saw a there would be a need to securely govern and manage the employee “consumption” of GenAI to prevent data, PII and IP loss. We did a great deal of discovery work, talking with 56 CISOs about what they believed would be the requirements to securely and responsibly manage GenAI to achieve its promise of improved productivity. At the time, enterprises were either trying to block GenAI (unsuccessfully) or were undergoing cautious, but fragmented experimentation. fragmented ways. Portal26 was built to proactively guide adoption, helping organizations unlock productivity and innovation while staying secure and compliant.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Raman reflected:
“One thing that stands out has been our ongoing ability to attract and sign up top tier talent to accelerate our growth. Another is seeing the platform do exactly what we designed it to do – as we worked with our Fortune 500 as well as mid-size companies gain the visibility and control they needed to confidently scale GenAI use in full production across the enterprise.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Raman explained:
“Portal26’s platform has two core components. First is targeted at CISOs and cybersecurity teams and is centered around security and governance, with modules that enable Shadow AI discovery and prevention, risk detection, audit and forensics (for compliance), and inline controls to prevent risky prompts. Once guardrails are in place, the second component helps CIOs, CFOs and Dept. heads bridge from security to productive full-scale deployment and enterprise-wide adoption.
“In these modules, our customers can leverage their actual employee consumption data to understand real use cases, intent, create an effective GenAI strategy, optimize adoption, and manage licenses and internal AIs for ROI. Together, the two components provide full-life cycle management of secure, productive and successful GenAI adoption.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? Raman acknowledged:
“We are literally in real-time entering a brave new world where how work is done is fundamentally changing. It is amazing that almost every single day brings a new development or technology breakthrough – so the biggest challenge is not just keeping up with the developments as they happen, but anticipating what our customer’s needs will be.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Raman noted:
“As mentioned earlier, Portal26 evolved from providing full visibility of all GenAI consumption for security, governance and risk detection into becoming an essential platform to manage the full GenAI adoption lifecycle including understanding use cases development, strategy, licensing controls, and measuring productivity and ROI.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Raman cited:
- Being the only company in our category achieving NIST AND SOC2 compliance – our defense-grade encrypted vault is critical for securely storing an organization’s GenAI data and traffic including all prompts and attachments.
- Helping both Fortune 500 and mid-size enterprises gain full visibility into their organization’s GenAI use, enabling them to go from cautious experimentation to confidently scaling Gen AI adoption with measurable productivity gains.
- Significant sales milestones have included getting our first 350K+, our first 650K+ deal, and our first 2M+ deal within months of each other, The growth has been phenomenal
- Other significant customer milestones include partnering with multiple large enterprises with over 50K employees! That requires a seriously stable, resilient, and powerful platform!
- Of course, our recent Series A raise of $9M in funding which demonstrated confidence in our vision, leadership team and sales growth.
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Raman highlighted:
“A CISO from a global SaaS company highlighted how Portal26 enabled proactive visibility and governance that unlocked innovation, and credited the platform with helping global teams adopt AI productively and securely.”
Funding/Revenue
Are you able to discuss funding? Raman revealed:
“Portal26 announced a $9M funding Series A round in November 2025.”
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Raman assessed:
“The TAM Bottom-up market opportunity: $8.4 billion for G5000/ $1.7 billion for F1000
— Top-down estimates for governance/security are at $10B+ representing 10% of 100B spend on GenAI by 2027”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Raman affirmed:
- Our holistic, full-life cycle approach to GenAI Adoption management in one platform.
- Portal26 is unique in that we provide not only Shadow AI detection and GenAI security, we also provide GenAI strategy, use case optimization, license intelligence, ROI/Value estimation, policy management, and user education – everything an enterprise needs to get real value from their GenAI program
- Time to set up (often less than 30 minutes) and time to ROI typically within 72 hours.
- The only NIST certified data vault in the industry.
- Real success working with our customer partners including Fortune 500 companies, in going from blocking, cautious experimentation to full scale successful production.
- Premier partnerships with top-tier organizations like AWS, Slalom, CapGemini and Uniqus.
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Raman emphasized:
“Future goals include staying ahead of developments in agentic AI, expanding support for internal LLM models, and expanding proactive adoption frameworks to enhance ROI and FinOps”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Raman concluded:
“Two things:
- There is power beyond security and governance in an organization’s actual GenAI use data – be it sanctioned or unsanctioned use. It provides the guideposts for anticipating use cases, creating strategy, maximizing adoption and determining ROI. And to date, legacy SWGs and security providers do not store this data at all, making the automation of deep and rich analytics and forensics near impossible.
- Every organization has gaps in their SWG, DLP and other security protocols as legacy tools are not optimized for GenAI – we often discover 100%+ risky, unsanctioned GenAI activity within the organizations we work with that expose them to real risk. It’s important to look at Adoption Management platforms that are purpose-built for the unique nature of GenAI and Agentic usage.”
