Cloud resource optimization startup Exotanium Inc. said today it has secured the funds it needs to support its future product roadmap after closing on a $12 million Series A round of funding led by Cambium Capital and Celesta Capital.

Exotanium is a startup with a lot of promise, offering cloud infrastructure optimization tools that it says can help enterprises to achieve significant savings while elevating performance and boosting security. Its platform, which is based on patent-pending technology developed at Cornell University, is claimed to increase the amount of computing enterprises use by up to five times, using the same budget.

Exotanium says it does this by using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to give customers a much finer level of control over the cloud computing resources they use. To ensure maximum efficiency of cloud resources, Exotanium’s software helps companies consolidate idle workloads and oversized containers and take advantage of deeply discounted servers and compute instances via the spot market.

Exotanium’s main technology is called xSpot, and it enables companies to relocate containers between spot instances when they’re available, and regular instances when they’re not. In this way, it says, the average enterprise can realize savings of up to 90% on their cloud computing spend.

Exotanium co-founder and Chief Executive Hakim Weatherspoon said many companies spend as much as half of their revenue on cloud services, yet a significant amount of that spending is wasted on idle systems. “Our unprecedented technology is changing this,” he said. “Within five years, Exotanium will be the only continuous optimization provider allowing enterprises to manage workloads across all major cloud platforms automatically.”

The CEO’s comments ooze confidence around the startup’s unique solution, and that is backed by a growing roster of notable customers, including the U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories’ Argonne and Idaho labs.

With the completion of today’s round, Exotanium has raised a total of $19 million in funding, including a $5 million seed funding round last year that was led by Walden International and Nepenthe Capital LLC, and a $1.6 million grant from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

“It is clear that Exotanium’s solution could benefit many different vertical markets,” said Cambium Capital’s Landon Downs. “From wins in computer-aided design tools to electronic automated design tools to high-performance scientific applications, Exotanium has an impressive customer roster with room to grow.”

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said that because so many workloads are moving to the cloud, enterprises have been forced to take cloud optimization very seriously. “The cloud optimization segment has been around for almost as long as the cloud itself, but it can definitely benefit from a fresh set of eyes and innovations, and that’s what Exotanium is bringing to the table,” Mueller said. “It’s good to see the investment in promising startups that can help enterprises get a handle on their cloud investments.”

The startup said the funding will be used to facilitate the expansion of its platform from Amazon Web Services to additional clouds like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud. The company will also expand its engineering teams and dedicate funds to its marketing efforts to raise brand awareness.

Image: Exotanium