Introduction
Palo Alto Networks builds the network, cloud, and security-operations platforms that a large share of the world’s enterprises use to control what traffic and traffic patterns are allowed to move across their networks. Founded in 2005 by Nir Zuk, a former engineer at Check Point and NetScreen, and Rajiv Batra, the company built its early reputation on the next-generation firewall, a device that could identify applications and enforce policy rather than simply filtering by port and protocol.
Two decades later, Palo Alto Networks is one of the largest pure-play cybersecurity companies by revenue, and it has spent the past several years pursuing what it calls “platformization” — persuading customers to replace a patchwork of point products with an integrated Palo Alto Networks stack. For readers of Brel’s AI in cybersecurity coverage, the company’s 2025-2026 acquisition run is a useful window into how a legacy security vendor tries to become the default control plane for enterprise AI rather than simply adding AI features to existing products.
What the company does
Palo Alto Networks organizes its portfolio into three platforms: a network security platform built around next-generation firewalls and Prisma SASE for secure remote access; a cloud security platform, Prisma Cloud, covering workload and code security; and a security operations platform, built on Cortex XDR and XSIAM, for detection and automated response. Layered across all three is Prisma AIRS, an AI security platform intended to discover, assess, and protect AI models, applications, and autonomous agents across their full lifecycle rather than treating AI as a bolt-on feature.
Who it serves
According to the company’s own materials, Palo Alto Networks serves more than 70,000 organizations across over 150 countries, including 85 of the Fortune 100, spanning enterprises, service providers, and government entities of nearly every size and industry. Its customer base is broad enough that the company positions consolidation itself — fewer vendors, fewer consoles, fewer integration gaps — as a primary value proposition rather than any single point capability.
Company background
Nir Zuk founded Palo Alto Networks in Santa Clara, California, on March 1, 2005, together with Rajiv Batra, after concluding that firewalls built around ports and protocols could no longer distinguish legitimate business applications from the threats hiding inside them. The company went public in 2012 and has been led since 2018 by CEO Nikesh Arora, a former Google and SoftBank executive who has driven much of its acquisition-led expansion into cloud and AI security. On August 18, 2025, Zuk retired as founder and chief technology officer after two decades with the company, with Chief Product Officer Lee Klarich succeeding him as CTO and joining the board. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara and trades on Nasdaq under the ticker PANW, reporting revenue of $9.22 billion for its fiscal year ended July 31, 2025.
Product and AI capabilities
Prisma AIRS is Palo Alto Networks’ dedicated AI security platform, built around a “Discover, Assess, Protect” model: discovering AI models, datasets, and agents already running inside an organization; assessing them for vulnerabilities through automated red-teaming; and protecting them at runtime against prompt injection, data leakage, and unauthorized actions. The company has assembled this platform through acquisition as much as internal development. Its February 2026 acquisition of CyberArk added privileged-access and machine-identity governance for the service accounts and API tokens that AI agents rely on; its 2025 acquisition of Protect AI added model and pipeline scanning; its Chronosphere deal added production-grade observability; and its May 2026 acquisition of AI Gateway provider Portkey added a centralized control plane, already processing trillions of tokens per month, that inspects and governs AI traffic in real time. Together, Palo Alto Networks describes this combination as the industry’s most comprehensive Agent Security Platform, designed specifically for AI systems that reason, decide, and act rather than simply respond to prompts.
Key developments
Palo Alto Networks pioneered the next-generation firewall starting in 2005 and expanded steadily into cloud and security-operations platforms over the following two decades. Its most consequential recent moves have been a series of AI-security acquisitions: Protect AI and Koi Security for AI supply-chain and endpoint governance, Chronosphere for observability, CyberArk (completed February 11, 2026) for identity and privileged-access governance, and Portkey (announced April 30, 2026 and completed May 29, 2026) for AI traffic gateway control. Nir Zuk’s August 2025 retirement as CTO closed out the founder-led era of the company’s technical direction, handing that responsibility to long-time product chief Lee Klarich just as the AI-security acquisition strategy was accelerating.
Why it matters
Palo Alto Networks is a useful bellwether for how incumbent, platform-scale security vendors respond to a new threat category rather than cede it to venture-backed startups: instead of building every AI-security capability from scratch, the company has systematically acquired point solutions for AI model scanning, identity, observability, and gateway control and stitched them into one branded platform. Because Prisma AIRS sits inside the security stack of tens of thousands of existing customers, its adoption curve is a concrete, if vendor-reported, proxy for how quickly ordinary enterprises are moving from experimenting with AI to running it as a governed part of production infrastructure.
Sector context
Within Brel’s AI in cybersecurity coverage, Palo Alto Networks competes for cloud-security budgets with Wiz, now part of Google Cloud, and for security-operations budgets with CrowdStrike, though each vendor is converging toward the same broad platform footprint from a different starting point — network firewalls for Palo Alto Networks, endpoint telemetry for CrowdStrike, and agentless cloud scanning for Wiz. Its network-security and SASE business also increasingly overlaps with Zscaler and Netskope as all three vendors race to secure the same remote-access and AI-traffic use cases.
Sources and references
This profile draws on Palo Alto Networks’ official newsroom, investor relations announcements, and product blog, alongside independent reference sources.
- Palo Alto Networks Newsroom — “Palo Alto Networks Completes Acquisition of Portkey to Secure AI Agents” (2026)
- Palo Alto Networks Investor Relations — “Palo Alto Networks Announces Retirement of Nir Zuk, Founder and CTO” (2025)
- Palo Alto Networks Blog — “Securing the AI Enterprise — Introducing Prisma AIRS 3.0” (2026)
- Wikipedia — “Palo Alto Networks”