Israeli cloud infrastructure optimization startup Spotinst says it has “hyperexpansion” on its mind after raising a new funding round worth $35 million.

The Series B round, led by Highland with participation from previous investors Leaders Fund, Intel Capital and Vertex Ventures, brings the company’s total funding to $52 million.

That’s a considerable sum of money for a company few have heard of, but it’s not without good reason. That’s because Spotinst specializes in helping companies by optimizing their cloud computing spend across multiple providers, thus saving them huge amounts of cash.

Spotinst relies on artificial intelligence software to help its customers manage cloud workloads across different data centers, claiming it can achieve savings of 80 percent on average. It does this primarily by tapping into excess server capacity offered by public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and Alibaba Cloud, the subsidiary of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

These cloud companies sell excess data center capacity, which is usually referred to as “spot instances,” at significantly discounted rates rather than not sell it at all. But most enterprises fail to benefit from these cheaper prices because they’re unable to predict its availability.

Spotinst can accurately predict the availability of this excess capacity, however. The company relies on its AI-powered software that can intelligently manage, provision and orchestrate spare capacity to help its customers take better advantage of these cheaper compute resources.

It works by using a combination of predictive algorithms, data analytics and historical data, enabling it to predict when spot instances are available at lower prices. Also, when the spot instances become unavailable something that happens when the cloud providers don’t have any excess capacity available, Spotinst can immediately migrate applications onto regular instances in order to avoid downtime.

“We enable cost optimisation through automation,” said Spotinst co-founder and Chief Executive Amiram Shachar. “It means that our customers can be proactive in managing their cloud usage, rather than reactive.”

The benefits of proactively managing cloud usage are not to be ignored, based on Spotinst’s impressive list of customers that includes Sony Corp., Samsung Electronics Ltd., Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and Uniliver Plc.

Interestingly, Spotinst said it has yet to spend the initial $15 million in Series A funding that it closed in 2017 because it has been profitable enough to run on its operating cash flow alone. Now, though, the company wants to spend big as it looks to pursue a role in delivering new and emerging infrastructure technologies such as serverless computing and software container management.

“The time is right for us to begin a period of hyper expansion and grow across multiple markets,” Shachar said. The idea is to help developers and DevOps teams deploy serverless containers using the Kubernetes container orchestration technology, which is rapidly becoming one of the most popular ways of building new software applications.

“The compute infrastructure will be completely managed by Spotinst, delivering tremendous costs savings for enterprises,” Shachar said.

Shachar appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile event livestreaming studio, during the RSA security conference in 2016, where he provided his thoughts on the most ideal use cases for spot instances:

Image: Spotinst