For years, twin sisters Nilo and Jen Rahmani have exchanged stories and compassion about the challenges they face in their respective engineering jobs.
Niro told TechCrunch that a frequent topic of conversation was dissatisfaction with the reliability platform he uses for work. When they realized a few years ago that the reliability landscape was starting to change, they thought they had the best experience to build a reliability solution suited to the direction the industry was heading.
“Before, reliability came first no matter what,” Nilo told TechCrunch. “now [companies] Cloud costs are getting more attention. Entire industries are being hit by these costs, and the challenges increase exponentially as businesses grow. ”
The Rahmani sisters decided to launch Thoras to find a satisfying medium that would allow businesses to ensure reliability without overusing cloud resources. The Washington, DC-based company uses AI to help engineers quickly discover and uncover the root causes of software disruptions. Thoras also helps enterprises discover optimization opportunities within reliability and save on cloud costs.
Thoras claims it can help businesses find and resolve issues 70% faster than other methods, while saving businesses up to 60% in cloud costs.
CEO Nilo said the platform is designed to predict fluctuations in demand, allowing businesses to more efficiently prepare for potential reliability disruptions and leverage the right cloud resources in advance. said.
Cloud observability already has many players on board, including New Relic, Splunk, and Dynatrace. As AI advances, this category also seems poised to grow. Linux and cloud infrastructure company SUSE announced new cloud observability tools in November 2024.
Niro said he thinks it's the approach to AI that will help set Taurus apart. Taurus leverages machine learning technology, but said its software is not overly leveraged with large-scale language models. Instead, Thoras chooses smaller models with a clearer ROI. She added that many of their competitors are built around these LLMs, but they are not always accurate and can cause companies to over-consume resources.
Taurus came out of stealth in January 2024 and raised a $1.5 million pre-seed round in March 2024. The company has seen a 360% increase in revenue over the past nine months. The company is now announcing new funding to meet customer demand.
The startup has raised $5 million in a seed round led by Wellington Ventures with participation from investors including Sinewave Ventures, Focal Ventures, and Storytime Capital. The company plans to use the money to hire engineers, build products and meet demand.
“This round has been smooth sailing the entire time,” Nairo said, comparing it to the company's pre-seed round. “We had the traction and metrics to prove that we understood the product-market fit and what we needed to do to get to the next level.”
Thoras has so far focused on Kubernetes environments, which was by design, but Nilo says future product expansions will include moving to other types of cloud software. .
COO Jen told TechCrunch that she never expected she and Niro would start a company together. Immigrant parents were similarly surprised that they were interested in giving up the security that comes with a full-time job. But Jen explained that she and Nilo are a “power duo” who use their connection as twins to better solve problems.
“First of all, [our parents] We were confused and nervous,” Niro said. “They've always believed in us. Now they're excited to see what we're doing.”