Vantage, a cloud cost optimization startup that counts NASA among its customers, has secured $21 million in new funding to finance growth initiatives.

Vantage announced the funding round, a Series A investment, this morning. Scale Venture Partners was the lead investor. The round also saw the participation of Andreessen Horowitz, Harpoon Ventures and multiple angel investors, including Cloudflare Inc. Chief Executive Matthew Prince.

Vantage, incorporated as VNTG Inc., provides a platform that helps companies track how much they’re spending on cloud services and find cost-cutting opportunities. The platform supports major public clouds such as Amazon Web Services. It also works with a growing list of software-as-a-service applications, including New Relic and MongoDB Atlas.

“Now organizations can simply connect their various infrastructure accounts to Vantage, invite their teammates and begin saving money for each of the infrastructure providers they use,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ben Schaechter.

AWS customers can lower their cloud expenses by buying Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, cost-efficient versions of standard instances that come with an up to 72% discount. The discount is conditional on customers committing to using a Reserved Instance for one to three years. In some cases, the need to make an upfront usage commitment can complicate companies’ efforts to realize the potential cost savings.

Vantage’s platform provides a feature called Autopilot that addresses the challenge. Autopilot can buy Reserved Instances on a company’s behalf and sell them once they’re no longer needed. The ability to offload unneeded Reserved Instances easily reduces the complexity associated with using them, which makes it easier to leverage their discounted pricing for cost-cutting purposes. 

Vantage also provides other automation features. According to the startup, its platform can analyze a company’s cloud environment and automatically point out opportunities to increase efficiency. The platform can, for example, highlight if a company could lower costs by switching from a standard instance to a Reserved Instance or by deprovisioning unused storage resources.

The platform enables companies to track their cloud expenses through pre-packaged dashboards. The dashboards can break down spending by service or business unit, as well as measure how that spending changes over time. For added measure, it provides a feature that enables administrators to forecast future cloud expenses. 

Several other venture-backed startups offer rival tools that also promise to help companies measure and reduce their cloud expenses. According to Vantage, one of its platform’s main differentiators is its competitive pricing. It says the platform costs a third of what some of its competitors charge.

Vantage has more than 300 customers including NASA, PBS and several well-funded enterprise software startups. The startup says its platform helps customers track more than $1 billion in annual infrastructure spending. To further grow its market presence, it will make enhancements to its platform as well as hire more employees.

Image: Vantage