Global cloud spending will surge past $700 billion this year. Megacaps alone will spend more than $300 billion on AI in 2025, with much more on the way. The innovation potential of the cloud has never been higher, never been more hotly contested, and never come with a higher price tag.
In the late 2000s, the cloud reshaped the global economy and enabled life as we know it. Now, in the mid 2020s, AI is poised to do the same. Once again, the companies that offer the most salient innovations with the most durable unit economics will become the pillars of our brave new world.
CloudZero was created to power efficient innovation in the cloud by connecting engineering decisions to business outcomes. For nearly a decade, we’ve done just that for the world’s most sophisticated cloud spenders, including Coinbase, DraftKings, Expedia, and many more. And last week, we announced a $56M Series C investment round, led by BlueCrest Capital Management and Innovius Capital, with participation from Matrix Partners, Threshold Ventures, Underscore VC, and G20 Ventures. MongoDB also made a strategic investment.
Why CloudZero?
This brings CloudZero’s total primary capital investment up to $118M — the most of any FinOps startup. This begs the question: Why CloudZero? What makes CloudZero the single FinOps startup that has inspired the most confidence in venture investors?
1. Complete visibility
CloudZero was founded on the unique, yet intuitive premise that cloud efficiency starts with visibility. That is, when engineers can see what they’re spending, where it’s inefficient, and how to remediate those inefficiencies, they build more efficient software. No engineer wants to waste money, but until CloudZero, no platform existed to make it easy for them to build — and spend — efficiently in the cloud.
Why? Because cloud billing has many inherent complexities. Software companies tend to take a multi-cloud approach — combining hyperscalers, cloud databases, AI models, observability solutions, shared infrastructure (e.g., Kubernetes), and more — each with its own billing approach and often shared access teams, making cost data hard to unify, much less allocate.
The combination of CloudZero AnyCost™ and CostFormation® eliminates all of these obstacles. CloudZero normalizes all cloud billing information in a common data model, and then allocates it according to any business dimension — product, feature, customer, team, microservice, etc. — showing all engineers precisely how much their cloud infrastructure costs, at each hour of the day. With this information in hand, engineering and finance teams can perform multi-dimensional analysis to understand what drives those costs and, more importantly, how to manage them.
2. Unit economics
In addition to the most granular visibility available anywhere, CloudZero also transforms cost and usage data into multi-dimensional unit economic views. We show food delivery apps their cost per 1,000 orders; we show shipping logistics companies their cost per 1,000 shipments; we show digital marketing hubs their cost per 1,000 emails and SMS messages.
Then, the magic happens. By combining this high-level data with our elite, complete visibility, we enable companies to explore their unit economic data by their most relevant business dimensions — geographic region, time of day, or anything else. This reveals efficiency trends that would be impossible to uncover otherwise.
3. Automated savings
Complete visibility plus unit economics gives companies maximally explorable cost data: how cloud efficient their company is as a whole, and which segments of their business are most and least cloud efficient. The last step is making it simple for them to eradicate those inefficiencies.
CloudZero does just that by combining visibility with automated insights and optimization. We automatically identify savings opportunities; use CloudZero’s complete visibility to determine which engineers are responsible for which cloud resources; and integrate with Slack and Jira to send savings opportunities directly to those engineers. We’ve got some very exciting updates in this area, coming very soon — stay tuned.
A Comprehensive FinOps Solution
By combining visibility, unit economics, and automated savings, CloudZero is well-positioned to do something no other FinOps platform can do: deliver fully agentic FinOps in the age of AI. And, while this gives a high-level view of what sets CloudZero apart, our differentiation doesn’t end there.
What’s harder to quantify through a technical lens, but what I observe and feel every day, is the strength of our culture.
That starts with our people, who wake up every day energized to deliver positive business outcomes and a great experience for our customers. These are the people who envision the future of FinOps, who build toward that future, who tell the world our story. The people who make CloudZero a Boston Business Journal Best Place To Work year in and year out. Culture is an emergent property of a group of people, and CloudZero’s is sublime.
CloudZero has come a long way — and we have a long way to go yet. We have a vision that transcends traditional cloud cost optimization, and that is squarely focused on helping companies maximize cloud-driven profitability. I’ve never believed more in our ability to execute on this vision, with these people, right now.
To our customers, thank you for partnering with CloudZero and helping us shape the future of FinOps. To our investors, thank you for believing in and fueling our vision. Most of all, to everyone on our team, thank you for making CloudZero what it is.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
