It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the public cloud in enabling economic growth in the last decade. The public cloud dramatically lowered the barrier of entry for startups and growing software companies to host applications and scale their infrastructure in line with usage. By providing a shared set of computing services and infrastructure on-demand, cloud providers removed the need to manage a hardware footprint, and thus became a catalyst of SaaS growth.
I had the privilege of being an early adopter of cloud technologies at Netflix when I managed the Cloud Solutions team there through 2013, in the days when Netflix accounted for over a third of all downstream internet traffic. The complexity of adopting and migrating services to the cloud has decreased since then and global spend on cloud services has continued to balloon. In fact, Gartner estimates that worldwide spend on public cloud services will grow to ~$592B in 2023, up from $490B in 2022. The increase in cloud adoption has led to a sustained focus on managing infrastructure spend and the importance of this has only increased over time.
Scale recognized this pain point in 2014, and subsequently led an investment in CloudHealth, which was a first-generation cloud cost management platform to provide customers visibility into their cloud spend. CloudHealth successfully exited to VMware in 2018 and since then global cloud spend has almost tripled, with the complexity of managing cloud infrastructure growing in lockstep.
We’ve continued to follow this space and look for the winner in the next iteration of cloud cost management software. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Scale is leading a $21M Series A round in Vantage, which offers the best solution we’ve seen in cloud cost management from an experienced founding team that’s well-poised to lead the category.
This is not the market of the 2010s
When we look across cloud environments today and compare them to those of ten years ago, we find things have changed significantly. There is a proliferation of new tools, services, and technologies being employed to run cloud infrastructure. These span from Observability providers, to cloud data warehouses, to the advent of Kubernetes container orchestration. As a result, IT budgets are continuing to grow and the macro pullback has only accentuated the need to reign in and better understand and manage cloud costs.
Vantage generates significant ROI in the enterprise
Vantage is a self-service cost visibility platform that helps businesses manage and optimize their cloud infrastructure costs. The founding team at Vantage has spent more than 10 years working across public cloud infrastructure as early employees at DigitalOcean and more recently on the product team at AWS. They bring a nuanced understanding of modern enterprise needs related to infrastructure cost management and offer native support for service providers beyond the big three clouds.
Companies continue to increase the adoption of ancillary infrastructure providers outside of core cloud computing. Vantage is purpose-built as a single platform offering spend visibility across a range of technologies including Datadog, Snowflake, MongoDB, and Kubernetes, among others. Their deep integrations provide unique insights for both engineering and financial operations teams as Vantage captures granular usage data within each application enabling enterprises to determine what is driving costs in a readily consumable format. Vantage’s CEO & co-founder Ben Schaechter summed up their value proposition perfectly when he told me recently, “Companies are increasingly using more providers like Datadog, Snowflake and MongoDB alongside primary clouds of AWS, Azure or GCP. In some cases, these cloud service providers outsize the bills of the primary cloud bill. Having a single pane of glass to manage and optimize all cloud costs is becoming an imperative for organizations of all sizes and that’s where we come in to help with Vantage.”
We found Vantage’s comprehensiveness of integrations across infrastructure providers and quick time-to-value for customers using the platform are key differentiators in a market whose importance is only continuing to grow. I’m eager to partner with Ben and Brooke as they continue to scale their business.