Optimaze, a Sydney-based AI-cloud waste startup, has raised $3 million in a round led by Arconic and The Innovation Club.
Optimaze will use the funding to expand its engineering team, accelerate its product roadmap, and establish strategic partnerships with major cloud services, starting with AWS.
Optimaze’s AI-native platform aims to improve enterprises' ability to identify and act on cloud waste at scale by quantifying the financial impact in real-time.
AI agents aim to reduce human recurring financial operations tasks, such as tagging resources, by up to 90 per cent. The company claims that the result is "a lower cost base, better environment and significantly improved data to make better business decisions".
Optimaze will charge its users based on achieved outcomes and usage.
The company was founded by Ralf Capel, former AWS commercial lead, and Dawshiek Yogathasar, former Rokt VP of engineering.
Capel said with the current AI boom, instead of addressing the root cause, companies are pouring more money into expanding cloud infrastructure, making the problem exponentially more urgent.
“We have seen first hand how cloud literate companies reduce their on demand cloud use by well over 30 per cent through clever optimisation and management," he said.
"However this is often a labour intensive piece of work that takes engineers and finance people away from their core activities. After searching unsuccessfully for technology that could systematically fix this, we decided to create Optimaze.”
The company is currently in private beta and interested customers can request preview access to the software.