What does your cloud cost? CloudZero raises $32M to help businesses answer this question and reduce spend

It’s become a fact of modern business, at least if your company has a digital presence: large or small, established or insurgent, no matter the industry, you likely need to think about cloud data storage — and the associated costs.

So it makes sense that CloudZero, a B2B firm that makes tools to help business customers understand and control their cloud costs, today announced $32 million in Series B funding to further expand its cloud intelligence platform.

“As the cloud continues to become an integral part of businesses, CloudZero is stepping up to make cloud cost management simpler, more effective, and more efficient,” said Phil Pergola, CEO of CloudZero. “Our platform is purpose-built for engineers, aligning the interests of finance, operations, and engineering teams and driving significant cost savings.”

The new funding round was spearheaded by Innovius Capital and Threshold Ventures, with additional contributions from existing investors Matrix Partners, Underscore VC, and G20 Ventures.

It’s a good time to be in the cloud business

CloudZero expects cloud spending to reach a record $600 billion in 2023, with 73% of companies reporting cloud costs as a major concern at the board level.

CloudZero has positioned itself as a frontrunner in this space by offering greater visibility into cloud costs across a multitude of providers.

Its platform empowers software teams to manage cloud spending at a granular level, helping them understand how specific product features or customer interactions impact their bottom line. The real-time data enables proactive cost optimization, limiting wastage by identifying costly code lines or SQL queries that may cause expense spikes.

“What distinguishes CloudZero from other vendors in the market is its ability to amalgamate all sources of cloud costs into one comprehensive platform,” stated Justin Moore, CEO of Innovius Capital. “This allows individual engineers to pinpoint exact cost drivers while enabling finance and operations teams to accurately forecast the company’s unit economics.”

Sky-high ambitions

CloudZero’s platform excels in providing complete visibility into every aspect of cloud expenditure through its AnyCost feature. It digests all types of cloud spend (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) in real-time, normalizes it into a common data model, and presents a coherent view to stakeholders.

In addition, CloudZero’s CostFormation feature combines billing and telemetry data to allocate every cent of spend into taggable and untaggable categories, including shared resources, multi-tenant architecture, and Kubernetes, eliminating manual tagging or spreadsheet use.

Perhaps the platform’s most distinguishing feature is its engineering engagement tools. CloudZero equips engineers with AI-powered anomaly detection, enabling them to optimize fixed and variable costs associated with their cloud consumption.

As Mike Rosenberg, Senior Director of Engineering at Nubank, put it, “CloudZero has one of the most powerful cloud cost intelligence platforms on the market. As a fellow data-driven organization, CloudZero is a strong cultural fit for Nubank, and we’re glad to partner with the team.”

But the forecast for fierce competition remains high

With this new capital, CloudZero plans to expand its platform features, develop its enterprise functionality, and ramp up its team to assist more customers in maximizing their cloud investments.

Yet at the same time, it faces fiercer competition than ever from other established rivals in the space, including Microsoft, which recently announced its new Fabric multi-cloud provider analytics platform, with an eye to take on Google and Amazon.