Cloud cost governance and optimization startup Adaptive6 Inc. says it’s ready to help large enterprises save millions of dollars on their cloud infrastructure spending after closing on a $28 million early-stage round of funding today.

The Series A round, which was led by U.S. Venture Partners and saw participation from New Era Capital Partners, Pitango VC, Forgepoint Capital and Vertex Ventures, brings the startup’s total amount raised to $44 million.

Adaptive6 has hit upon a novel way to help address the runaway costs of cloud infrastructure: By treating cost inefficiencies the same way as security platforms treat vulnerabilities, it reckons it can slash the average cloud bill by up to 35%.

The startup does this primarily by helping companies to avoid wasted spend. According to VMware Inc., the average company wastes about 31% of its cloud spending on resources that end up not being used. But with better planning and management, this wasted spend can easily be eliminated, the startup claims.

One of the reasons for this wasted spend is that most enterprises just don’t have the tools in place to identify where they’re throwing money away. Finance teams have access to platforms that can track cloud spending, but though they enable oversight, they can’t fix the underlying problems, which mostly stem from inefficiencies in cloud infrastructure and code.

Adaptive6 co-founder and Chief Executive Aviv Revach (pictured, center) said cloud cost control has always been treated as a “finance problem,” when that’s not really true. “Finance doesn’t own the code. The only way to actually fix cloud waste is to bring cost governance into the engineering workflow,” he said.

That is precisely what the company does, treating cost inefficiencies as security vulnerabilities. Its platform is designed to scan for wasted cloud spending across multiple cloud and data environments, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Snowflake and Databricks, as well as code repositories such as GitHub. Its proprietary wasted spend detection engine is capable of identifying both visible waste and also “shadow waste,” which refers to hidden inefficiencies that can be much harder to spot.

When it identifies waste, it traces the problem back to the line of code that’s causing it, before notifying the engineer responsible. The platform also has an artificial intelligence-powered remediation engine that integrates directly with GitHub and continuous integration/continuous development pipelines to support one-click fixes.

Its notifications include the full context of the issue and a recommendation on how it can be fixed. Engineers can then deploy the fix directly on the cloud platform with a single click, or if it’s a code issue, they can initiate a pull request.

The platform is not just reactive. Besides identifying wasted spend in existing infrastructure and code deployments, it also supports preventive policy enforcement to catch cost issues before new applications and code are deployed. “We built Adaptive6 to be the first end-to-end platform for cloud cost governance and optimization,” Revach said. “We detect what’s already wasting money, prevent new inefficiencies before they deploy, and remediate at scale, all within the engineering workflow.”

The startup says it’s already helping “dozens” of Fortune 500 and Global2000 customers to slash their cloud computing costs, including the German biotechnology and chemicals manufacturer Bayer AG. It said its customers typically see their cloud costs shrink by about 15% to 35% by the time their first bill comes around following deployment of its platform.

“It’s a game changer for cloud cost governance and optimization,” said Michael Aideloje, Bayer’s lead product manager for cloud FinOps. “As a large enterprise with complex infrastructure, Adaptive6 has helped us regain control of cloud waste and empowered our engineers to eliminate it at scale.”

U.S. Venture Partners General Partner Jacques Benkoski said cloud cost governance is shifting from a compliance function to an engineering practice, and he believes Adaptive6 is at the forefront of that transition. “They have brought the cybersecurity playbook to FinOps,” he said. “Detect, trace to code, remediate. Their growing enterprise traction confirms the strength of their vision and execution.”

Photo: Adaptive6