The AI Token FinOps Company.
Built by leaders from
What is AI Token FinOps?
AI Token FinOps is the control center for your AI budget and spending: tracking, allocating, and controlling AI Token budget at the unit level. It brings the rigor companies already apply to cloud costs (attribution, budgets, forecasting) down to every model call, so AI cost becomes visible and predictable before the invoice arrives.
- Founded
- 2025
- Headquarters
- Campbell, California
Built by a proven team
USPTO Patent
Named inventor — US 11,995,609
10M+ users
Scaled by our founders at Zangi
Behest today
Runs in your cloud
Your keys, your VPC, your egress
Safe by default
PII scrubbing + injection defense on every request
Leadership Team

Garen Azizian
Chief Executive Officer
- USPTO Patent Inventor
- Ex–Palo Alto Networks
- Ex–Oracle
25+ years building and securing enterprise software in Silicon Valley. Senior Director leading cybersecurity business units at Palo Alto Networks, with earlier roles at Oracle and Forcepoint. Launched a new homeowners-insurance line of business at eSurance (now part of Allstate), and at Audible Magic delivered content-identification technology to customers including Meta, Dailymotion, and SoundCloud. Named inventor on a granted USPTO patent (US 11,995,609).
LinkedIn
Levon Mikayelyan, PhD
Chief Technology Officer
- Co-Founder, Zangi (10M+ users)
- Ex–AWS
- Ex–Palo Alto Networks
25+ years architecting globally scalable, secure AI and SaaS platforms. Co-founder of Zangi, a privacy-first communication app with 10M+ active users. Former engineering leader at Amazon (AWS) and Palo Alto Networks, building systems that prioritize data integrity at enterprise scale.
LinkedIn
Tecali Tekeste
Founding Engineer
- Ex–Palo Alto Networks
- 20+ yrs Engineering
20+ years of software engineering, architecting and scaling high-performance AI backend platforms. Previously at Palo Alto Networks alongside Garen and Levon, bringing deep enterprise security and infrastructure experience to Behest AI's production systems.
LinkedInWhy we built Behest
We spent decades inside the companies that defined enterprise security and scale — Palo Alto Networks, Oracle, and Amazon — watching teams deploy AI faster than anyone could govern it.
The pattern was the same ungoverned sprawl we'd spent careers taming in security, only now it showed up on the invoice: spending on AI with no attribution, no budgets, and no controls — discovered after the bill arrived, never before.
So we built the missing layer: a control center that attributes every token, enforces hard budgets in real time, and puts governance in the request path — the one we'd bet our own AI budgets on.
Our principles
Govern the spending, not the team
Cost control shouldn't mean red tape. Behest enforces budgets in the request path, automatic and invisible to your builders, so finance gets control and engineering keeps moving.
You can't control what you can't see
Every AI dollar should trace to a person, a team, a decision — in real time, before the invoice, not buried in it. We turn the black box into a clear picture. Clarity is control.
Your cloud. Your keys. Your egress.
Behest self-hosts the control center in your cloud, with your keys — you control egress, and with self-hosted models your data stays in your environment. Trust is the default, never an upgrade you have to buy.
Security & data handling
Built to run inside your existing compliance program
Behest self-hosts in your VPC, so your provider keys, configuration, and control center stay in an environment you already control and audit. Every AI call gets a full audit trail, access is controlled per tenant and per user, and PII is scrubbed before a request reaches an external model — the technical controls your auditors look for when they assess a framework like SOC 2, HIPAA, or GDPR.
Behest provides technical controls that support your compliance obligations. Your certification and its scope remain yours to determine with your auditor.
Visit the Trust CenterTalk to the people building it
Evaluating Behest for your stack? Get a working demo and a straight answer on security, deployment, and cost — direct from the founding team.
Talk to the foundersOr get our AI Token FinOps insights by email: