Vantage raises $21M Series A to help bring down cloud costs

Vantage, a startup that helps businesses better understand their cloud infrastructure spend (and automate their savings), today announced that it has raised a $21 million Series A funding round led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from by Andreessen Horowitz, which led its seed round, as well as Harpoon Ventures, CloudFlare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince and Glenn Solomon (who is a managing partner at GGV but who is investing personally here). The company previously raised a $4 million seed round in 2021.

As Vantage co-founder and CEO (and former TechCrunch web developer) Ben Schaechter told me, the company now helps its more than 300 customers manage more than $1 billion in annual cloud costs. These customers now include the likes of Square, NASA, BuzzFeed, PBS, Ripple, PlanetScale and Barstool Sports and they connect a total of over 10,000 infrastructure accounts to Vantage at this point.

Image Credits: Vantage

When Schaechter and his co-founder Brooke McKim started out, the idea was to build a better AWS dashboard. As a part of this, the team built out a dashboard that helped its users visualize their AWS spend, which led the team to almost exclusively focus on this idea. Since then, Vantage has added support for Azure and GCP, but maybe even more importantly, it also added support for services like Datadog, Fastly, Databricks, Snowflake, New Relic, MongoDB and Kubernetes clusters, with support for services like Twilio, PlanetScale and IBM's and Oracle's clouds on the roadmap.

As Schaechter told me, Vantage is also profiting from the current downturn in the financial markets. Not only has FinOps become a thing, but companies are now actively looking for ways to bring down their infrastructure cost. "What's changed in the environment is that we had a decade-long bull market where everyone was focused on growth. That's obviously stopped or slowed -- and as a result, everyone's flipping to the bottom lines," he said. "Now it's: What can you optimize? You can optimize people cost through [reductions in force]. Or, typically, line-item number one is cloud infrastructure costs like AWS Azure or GCP and Snowflake. So there's just been this significant influx in cost efficiency and Vantage has been really well positioned to help customers from that perspective."