PointFive Raises $16M in Seed Funding to Enable Continuous Optimization of Cloud Spend for Enterprise
QUICK TAKE
- PointFive helps customers map out saving opportunities of 15-30% of their total cloud spend by uncovering deep, typically overlooked waste.
- Analysing services not covered by any other player in the market, PointFive is already recommended and promoted by AWS to customers.
- The company will use $16M in seed funding to expand its team, invest in R&D, and support sales and marketing in the US.
- A team of repeat entrepreneurs, PointFive’s founders previously built IntSights, a cybersecurity startup acquired by Rapid7 for $350M.
- The round was led by Index Ventures with participants including Assaf Rappaport, CEO and Co-Founder at Wiz; Mickey Boodaei, CEO and Co-Founder at Transmit Security; and Tamar Yehoshua, Former Chief Product Officer at Slack.
INDEX PERSPECTIVE
By Juriaan Duizendstraal, Partner at Index Ventures
Cloud spend is now one of the biggest outgoings for any tech-enabled company. For a long time, this wasn’t a major concern for most enterprise businesses, but evolving dynamics across the industry are now making the optimization of spending and the maximization of value derived from cloud investments a top priority. Amid this shift, PointFive is playing a key role in helping enterprises navigate the cost of cloud services.
The company is positioned at the intersection of these new dynamics, including a higher emphasis on profitability over rapid, high-growth strategies; the evolution of the FinOps role, which is becoming more technical; and the transition to an engineering mindset, reflecting a move away from centralized cloud management in favor of empowering application developers.
This is a team that has proven it can execute at scale. Co-founders Alon, Gal and Amir’s previous cybersecurity startup was acquired by Rapid7 for $350M in 2021. The idea to create PointFive comes directly from this experience – tasked with reducing cost across the enterprise following the takeover, they realized just how challenging managing cloud cost was – now, they’ve built a platform that can do this for any enterprise.
The PointFive team
THE DETAILS
Poor visibility, limited tracking, and minimal context for engineering activities have all meant that reducing cloud costs is a significant and expensive struggle for any enterprise. Challenges in calibration and accountability have further hindered the adoption of a frugal engineering approach, misaligning cloud usage with strategic business aims, blocking operational efficiency and preventing meaningful cost reductions.
PointFive is solving all this. While most existing services simply tell customers what they are spending and deliver limited or basic recommendations around inefficiencies, PointFive redefines cloud cost optimization with an end-to-end platform that goes far beyond surface insights. Transforming this analysis into action, the platform uncovers deep, infrastructure-level savings opportunities and empowers engineers.
The company’s detection technology delves into the intricacies of cloud spending, revealing hidden, typically overlooked inefficiencies. It then provides workflows designed for seamless implementation by the engineering team. The platform fosters proactive collaboration between FinOps and engineers by contextualizing insights for practical decision-making and generally cultivating a sense of cost awareness within the engineering team. Typically, the platform maps out saving opportunities in customer environments of between 15-30% of their total cloud spend – something which PointFive is already achieving for some of the most advanced cloud-native enterprises operating today.
Already promoted by AWS to its customers, PointFive goes deeper into the AWS cost architecture than competitors, analysing services that are not covered by any other player in the market. By doing this, PointFive helps AWS customers spend less and reroute their funds away from waste, and into innovation. That frees up funds to invest more in innovation and growing their business, creating mutually beneficial partnerships across the board.
The PointFive founding team—Alon Arvatz, Gal Ben-David, and Amir Hozez—have been working together for over a decade. They previously built IntSights, a cybersecurity startup that reached global scale with over $30M in ARR and hundreds of enterprise customers. After the acquisition by Rapid7, the team was tasked with reducing cloud costs across the enterprise, and immediately recognized the difficulty of tracking this problem. They saw an opportunity to build a new centralized platform that seamlessly transformed insight into action, and PointFive was born.
“In today's economy, where financial efficiency is critical and downsizing common, short-term optimizations fall short,” explains co-founder and CEO Alon Arvatz. “We founded PointFive to equip engineers and FinOps leaders with tools that enable them to move from reactive fixes to proactive optimization, which is vital for long-term resilience and adaptability. We understand that cloud cost management is an ongoing strategy and not a one-off tactic. Our technology and innovation goes deeper than any other solution, and we not only show customers where they stand, but also help them cross the finish line.”
Announcing $16 million in seed funding, PointFive will use the funding to expand its team, invest in R&D, and support sales and marketing in the US.
Published — June 19, 2024
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