Cisco announced on April 9, 2026 that it intends to acquire Galileo Technologies, a startup whose software evaluates, monitors and sets guardrails for AI agents and generative AI applications. Terms were not disclosed.
Galileo will become part of Cisco's Splunk business, where it is expected to strengthen AI Agent Monitoring in Splunk Observability Cloud. Kamal Hathi, senior vice president and general manager of Splunk, announced the deal in a company blog post.
Cisco originally expected the deal to close in the fourth quarter of its 2026 fiscal year, with both companies operating independently until then. A May 22, 2026 update to the announcement said the acquisition had been completed.
What Galileo built
Galileo was founded in 2021 by Vikram Chatterji, Yash Sheth and Atindriyo Sanyal, who had worked on AI at Google, Google Brain and Uber AI. Chatterji served as chief executive, Sheth as chief technology officer and Sanyal as chief product officer.
The company started by measuring the quality of AI models and moved into the tooling that teams need to run AI agents in production. Its platform covers prompt optimisation, model selection, evaluations, production monitoring and guardrails, and checks applications for hallucinations, bias and security issues while tracking cost and usage.
Galileo named Twilio, Comcast, HP and ServiceTitan as customers in 2024. SDxCentral reported that its customers also included NTT and that its partners included Nvidia and HP.
Hathi wrote that Galileo's platform had been adopted across the enterprise, providing real-time observability and guardrails for systems in which several AI agents work together.
“Galileo was purpose-built to solve one of the hardest and most consequential problems in AI: Trust.”
Why Cisco is buying
Hathi argued that AI agents are only as valuable as the trust businesses can place in their output, and that teams need visibility into AI systems that goes beyond measures such as latency and errors. He described Galileo as a platform that gives teams one place to instrument every stage of the agent development lifecycle.
Cisco said combining Galileo with Splunk would give customers real-time visibility and protection across that lifecycle, from development to production.
The two companies had worked together before. About a year earlier Cisco launched AGNTCY, an open consortium for agent infrastructure, with Galileo contributing security and observability work and LangChain contributing agent orchestration. Network World reported that Galileo also said it would contribute its Agent Control framework to the open-source community under the Apache 2.0 license.
The founders and the funding
In October 2024 Galileo raised a $45 million Series B led by Scale Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to $68 million. Databricks Ventures, Premji Invest, Amex Ventures, Citi Ventures, ServiceNow and SentinelOne joined the round, alongside existing investors Battery Ventures, Walden Capital and Factory.
At the time the company said its revenue had grown 834% since the start of 2024, its number of enterprise customers had quadrupled and six Fortune 50 companies had become customers.
Scale Venture Partners partner Andy Vitus joined Galileo's board as part of the Series B. The company said it would use the money to expand sales, grow product development and invest in AI evaluation research.
Neither company disclosed Galileo's headcount or how its staff would be placed inside Cisco.
What it means for Splunk customers
Cisco said Galileo would extend AI Agent Monitoring in Splunk Observability Cloud, giving customers one instrumentation layer that runs from prompt optimisation and model selection through evaluation to production monitoring. The company did not say whether Galileo's product would continue to be sold separately.
For Cisco, the deal adds to the AI features it has been building into Splunk, which SDxCentral said already included AI assistants, embedded machine learning and a model context protocol server for connecting agents to Splunk data. Hathi wrote that the aim was to turn observability from a nice-to-have into a core pillar of AI development.
Hathi described Galileo as a dynamic player in observability for AI and said the combination would help ensure a foundation of transparency and accuracy for companies deploying agents. Network World described Galileo as the industry standard for building trust in AI agents, citing the announcement.
