Companies don't necessarily need to create groundbreaking technology to gain traction in the marketplace. Simply being cheaper than your competitors can make a dent in a competitive industry. You can also rely on your connections to win over customers who need a timely solution to their problems.
nOps is one example. Like countless other vendors, nOps sells software designed to “optimize” the budgets that companies allocate to cloud products and services. But the company has managed to grow faster and bigger than many of its rivals, in part because it serves only AWS customers.
nOps claims that it has grown its customer base by 450% over the past 18 months, helping customers manage more than $1.5 billion in AWS cloud spend. This has clearly impressed investors, and this month nOps closed a $30 million Series A funding round led by PE firm Headlight Partners, bringing nOps' total funding to $40.5 million.
JT Giri, founder and CEO of nOps, began his career in the cloud industry as a network engineer and DevOps consultant. In 2012, he leveraged those skills to co-found nClouds, a consulting firm focused on AWS solutions. nOps launched as a spin-out from nClouds in 2017, and after Charles Thayne Capital acquired nClouds in 2022, Giri began focusing on nOps full time.
“The cloud space is a growing problem,” Giri told TechCrunch. “As companies make budget cuts to plan for 2025, a solution that provides comprehensive, automated visibility into cloud costs is critical.”
As Giri points out, efficient use of the cloud remains an aspiration rather than a reality for many companies, especially as they increasingly invest in cloud-hosted AI projects. (Gartner predicts spending on cloud services will reach $675.4 billion in 2024, up from $561 billion in 2023.) A 2024 Statista survey found that 84% of organizations felt managing cloud spending was a “significant” challenge, due to obstacles around governance, security and technical expertise.
nOps solves the cloud optimization roadblock from a few different angles: It generates dashboards and reports that show a company's overall AWS spend and automates tasks that can lead to cost savings, including steps like scheduling and “rightsizing” resources, stopping idle instances and containers, and dynamically adjusting storage volumes.
One of nOps' cloud spending dashboards. Image credit: nOps
“nOps uses AI and machine learning to analyze computing needs and automatically optimize for efficiency, reliability and cost,” says Giri. “For most products, nOps has a unique flexible pricing structure where clients don't pay until they save money, and nOps receives a percentage of those savings.”
Giri didn't disclose how much revenue nOps has made or how many customers it currently has, but he suggested that the Series A positions the startup well for the coming months.
So what's next for nOps? Giri says the plan is to grow the company's headcount from 60 employees today to 80 by the end of the year, and to build new integrations with AWS products and open-source cost optimization tools.
“From our experience processing over $1.5 billion in AWS cloud spend, we know that 30% of cloud costs are wasteful and 20% is leveraging on-demand, the most expensive purchase type, leaving a huge opportunity for organizations to reduce their monthly cloud costs,” Giri said. “nOps provides insights, identifies inefficiencies, and enables resource optimization through built-in automation or one-click changes.”