In 2021, Roi Ravhon, Asaf Liveanu and Yizhar Gilboa joined forces to found Finout, an enterprise toolkit that helps you manage and optimize cloud costs. (We talked about the company coming out of stealth in 2022.) Ravhon, CEO of Finout and previously director of engineering at observability platform Logz.io, says he was encouraged to launch Finout by obstacles he personally encountered in trying to understand cloud costs.
“One of the main challenges enterprises face is adopting a broad cloud cost management tool, which means primarily an organizational change,” Ravhon told TechCrunch. “Artificial intelligence could have enormous cost implications, either attributable to third parties or adding to the normal costs of the cloud infrastructure used for AI purposes.”
Indeed, amid the AI boom, corporations are committing a small mountain of money to cloud products and services. At the same time, they struggle to gain visibility and control over these costs.
According to report with Canalys, global spending on cloud infrastructure services alone grew 21% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2024, reaching $79.8 billion, an increase of $13.4 billion. However, two-thirds of corporations are unable to accurately report their cloud unit costs, and 58% say their costs are too high, according to CloudZero vote.
So how does Finout solve this problem? By integrating with the clouds and services what you are promoting already uses – including large, incumbent providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, etc. – to provide comprehensive visibility into your spend. In addition to analytics dashboards, Finout provides tools to reallocate and adjust cloud spend across departments, teams and individual projects, presenting options that a company won’t have found out on its own.
“For the senior IT manager, Finout technology provides comprehensive visibility into cloud spend, helping IT leaders identify inefficiencies and effectively optimize resources,” Ravhon said. “Advanced cost allocation features ensure accurate distribution of cloud spend across departments, supporting better budget management and accountability.”
Finout’s rivals in the cloud expense management tools industry, also referred to as FinOps, include Broadcom-owned CloudHealth and IBM Cloudability, in addition to startups equivalent to Vantage, Exostellar and Ternary. Despite this crowded market, Finout has attracted high-profile clients equivalent to The New York Times, Tenable and Wiz, with annual recurring revenue growing ninefold in 2022-2023.
To set the stage for further growth, Finout this week closed a $26 million Series B round led by Red Dot Capital with participation from Maor Investments, Team8, Pitango and Jibe Ventures. Bringing Finout’s total funding to $45 million, the money will probably be used to grow the Finout team from 45 to 75 people by the end of the yr, with a particular focus on the R&D, go-to-market and customer success teams.
“The technology slowdown has led many companies to focus on optimizing their unit economics, with cloud spend being a significant factor,” Ravhon said. “As organizations strive to improve their financial efficiency, Finout is thriving.”