nOps Raises $30M to Optimize AWS Customers’ Cloud Spend

Companies don’t necessarily have to produce groundbreaking technology to gain traction within the marketplace. Undercutting rivals could be enough to make a dent in a competitive industry. So can counting on connections to win customers who need a fast fix.

Operational Operations is an example of this. Like countless other vendors, nOps sells software designed to “optimize” the budgets that corporations spend on cloud services and products. Yet the corporate has managed to grow faster — and greater — than lots of its rivals, perhaps partially since it serves AWS customers exclusively.

nOps says its customer base has grown 450% prior to now 18 months and that it helps customers manage greater than $1.5 billion in AWS cloud spend. That clearly impressed investors; this month, nOps closed a $30 million Series A funding round led by PE firm Headlight Partners, bringing nOps’ total raised to $40.5 million.

JT Giri, founder and CEO of nOps, began within the cloud industry as a network engineer and DevOps consultant. In 2012, he decided to put those skills to use and co-founded AWS-focused consulting firm nClouds. nOps began as a spin-off of nClouds in 2017, and after nClouds was acquired by Charles Thayne Capital in 2022, Giri dedicated himself to nOps full-time.

“There’s a growing pain in the cloud space,” Giri told TechCrunch. “As companies tighten budgets ahead of fiscal year 2025 planning, a solution that provides a comprehensive, automated view of cloud costs is critical.”

As Giri notes, for a lot of corporations, effective use of the cloud stays an aspiration, not a reality, especially as corporations invest increasingly in cloud-hosted AI projects. (Gartner projects According to a 2024 Statista report, spending on cloud services will reach $675.4 billion in 2024, up from $561 billion in 2023. questionnaire84% of organizations said managing cloud spend was a “significant” challenge for them due to obstacles related to governance, security, and technology expertise.

nOps addresses the obstacles to cloud optimization from several different perspectives. It generates dashboards and reports that show all of an organization’s AWS spend and mechanically handles tasks that may potentially get monetary savings. This includes steps like resource planning and “rightsizing,” stopping idle instances and containers, and dynamically adjusting storage volumes.

“nOps uses AI and machine learning to analyze compute needs and automatically optimize for performance, reliability, and cost,” Giri said. “For most of its products, nOps has a unique and flexible pricing structure where it doesn’t get paid until the customer saves money; nOps gets a percentage of the cost savings.”

Giri didn’t say where nOps stands when it comes to revenue, nor did he say exactly how many shoppers nOps has today. But he did suggest that the Series A round positions the startup well for the approaching months.

What’s next for nOps? Giri says the plan is to grow from 60 employees now to 80 by the top of the yr, and construct recent integrations with AWS products and open-source cost-optimization tools.

“In our experience processing over $1.5 billion in AWS cloud spend, 30% of cloud costs are wasteful and 20% are spent on-demand, the most expensive type of purchase, leaving organizations with a huge opportunity to reduce their monthly cloud costs,” Giri said. “nOps provides insight, identifies inefficiencies, and enables resource optimization through built-in automation or one-click changes.”