Sydney-based AI-cloud waste startup Optimaze, a company that aims to solve a cloud waste problem costing businesses billions of dollars a year globally, has raised $3 million in a pre-seed round led by Arconic and The Innovation Club.
Founded last year by Dawshiek Yogathasar, a former VP of engineering at Rokt, and Ralf Capel, who spent almost a decade with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Optimaze leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to help businesses make better financial technology decisions and run their technology sustainably.
“Cloud waste has spiralled out of control, costing businesses billions and demanding roughly 1 per cent of global energy consumption,” says Capel.
“Instead of addressing the root cause, today companies are pouring more money into expanding cloud infrastructure and financial operations, making the problem exponentially worse.
“We have seen first-hand how cloud-literate companies reduce their on-demand cloud use by well over 30 per cent through clever optimisation. After searching unsuccessfully for technology that could systematically fix this, we decided to create Optimaze.”
The startup points to research that shows the cloud computing market will top US$1 trillion as early as next year and about US$10 billion in Australia. It says Global research and advisory firm Gartner estimates at least 30 per cent of this cloud spend is wasted.
“The energy waste in Australian cloud environments is already staggering and as AI workloads intensify, energy consumption is becoming a major bottleneck,” says Yogathasar. “We’re here to help change that.”
The Optimaze founders say that even in the cloud, businesses “inevitably hit a point where things become too complex” for standard resource-based cloud financial management systems with some tools that are now decades old failing to cope at today's scale.
The company's platform provides enterprise cloud customers with several AI-embedded products, including AI agents, to improve enterprise capability to control cloud spend, improve energy footprint and drive “quantifiable sustainability”.
The Optimaze AI-native platform is said to improve the ability of businesses to identify and act on cloud waste at scale by quantifying the financial impact in real-time.
AI agents help each stakeholder get relevant insights and take action, aiming to reduce human recurring financial operations tasks, such as tagging resources, by up to 90 per cent.
“Cloud spend is already the largest controllable cost after payroll, and it’s exploding as every business from SMBs to corporates deploy AI-heavy GPU workloads,” says Anthony Potts, managing partner at Arconic.
“Businesses will increasingly need to quantify which workloads create the most value.
“Optimaze’s AI agents deliver that insight in real time and automates fixes, setting a new standard for financial and environmental accountability in the cloud.”
Arconic is an AI-first fintech specialist venture capital firm while fellow investor Innovation Club is a sustainability focused venture capital firm.
Optimaze plans to use the funding to expand its engineering team, accelerate its product roadmap and establish strategic partnerships with major cloud services starting with AWS.
The startup is currently in private beta and says it is searching for new customers who will join a waitlist to get preview access to the software.
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