The man who learned AWS when it was still in beta and turned that early-mover intuition into a platform managing over $1.5 billion in cloud spend.
Jatinder "JT" Giri — San Francisco, CA
Before "FinOps" was a job title, JT Giri was already doing it by hand - optimizing AWS bills for Silicon Valley startups who had no idea what they were spending.
He started his cloud career the way most people start side hustles: with a Craigslist ad. He called himself a "Cloud Ninja." The year was 2006. Amazon had quietly launched EC2 in beta, barely anyone knew what to do with it, and Giri - then a network engineer who had just decided he hated cabling servers - saw the window open and jumped through it.
Two decades on, he is the CEO and Founder of nOps, an AI-powered platform that automates the unglamorous, expensive, and maddeningly complex work of managing AWS cloud costs. The company closed a $30 million Series A in August 2024 led by Headlight Partners. It now manages over $1.5 billion in AWS spend for hundreds of customers. That customer base grew 450 percent in 18 months.
"It's easy to provision resources on the cloud, but it can be incredibly difficult to optimize resources."JT Giri, CEO & Founder, nOps
The insight behind nOps is as simple as it is underappreciated: the hard part of cloud computing was never getting access to infrastructure. AWS made that trivially easy. The hard part is figuring out what you're running, whether you need all of it, whether you're paying the right rate for it, and how to fix it without breaking production. That's the gap Giri spent a decade staring at before he built a company to close it.
What separates nOps from the dozens of cost management dashboards that have come and gone is its business model: rather than charging a flat subscription, nOps takes a percentage of the savings it generates. No savings, no fee. It's a bet that aligns the company's incentives with its customers' - and one that Giri is visibly comfortable making.
Giri's origin story starts in a place he describes with unmistakable distaste: a data center, surrounded by cables. He was a network engineer, good at configuring systems, miserable racking servers. When he discovered Amazon's early EC2 offering in 2006, something clicked. Here was infrastructure you never had to touch physically. No cables. No racking. Just provision and go.
He pivoted hard. In the years between 2006 and 2012, he built up consulting work helping Silicon Valley startups migrate to this strange new thing called "the cloud." His early marketing strategy would raise eyebrows today: he posted ads on Craigslist under the handle "Cloud Ninja." It worked. Clients came. He got good at what most engineers were still ignoring.
In 2012, he co-founded nClouds - a consulting firm entirely focused on AWS. The timing was right. More and more enterprises were asking how to move to the cloud, and nClouds could show them. It grew into an award-winning AWS Premier Consulting Partner with a long list of enterprise clients and a shelf full of credentials.
"Building a company is a marathon, not a sprint."JT Giri
But something else was happening inside nClouds. The team kept building internal tools to manage the cloud environments they were operating for clients. Cost dashboards. Change management workflows. Compliance checks. These tools were good - good enough that they started to look less like internal utilities and more like a product.
In 2017, Giri spun that IP out into a separate company: nOps. At the time, he was running both nClouds and nOps in parallel. Then, in 2022, Charles Thayne Capital acquired nClouds, and Giri had a decision to make. He chose nOps. He's been running it full-time ever since - and the results suggest he made the right call.
The platform nOps has built does the things that cloud teams most want to automate but rarely have time to build themselves: rightsizing compute instances, managing Spot instance reliability, handling Savings Plans optimization, scheduling dev environments to turn off when nobody's using them, and generating the compliance and cost reports that finance teams keep asking for. All of it powered by machine learning models that get better as they see more usage data.
The August 2024 Series A - $30 million from Headlight Partners - validates that thesis commercially. Giri plans to use the capital to deepen the platform's AWS integrations, push further into Karpenter and EKS optimization, and expand the team. As of the announcement, nOps had around 60 employees and was aiming for 80 by year-end.
It's easy to provision resources on the cloud, but it can be incredibly difficult to optimize resources.
Showing up every day is key to success.
Building a company is a marathon, not a sprint.
nOps uses AI and machine learning to analyze compute needs and automatically optimize for efficiency, reliability and cost.
His first cloud consulting clients came from a Craigslist ad where he described himself as a "Cloud Ninja" - in 2006, when most CIOs still thought cloud meant weather.
He started working with Amazon EC2 while it was still in beta. Most enterprises hadn't heard of AWS yet. He had client projects running on it.
nOps didn't start as a new idea - it started as internal tooling at nClouds that was too useful not to turn into a product. The best SaaS companies often start this way.
nOps' pricing model is performance-based: they take a cut of savings generated for the customer. If they don't save you money, you don't pay. Most SaaS companies don't have the confidence to do that.
He credits four habits as instrumental to his success: curiosity, a willingness to embrace discomfort, daily meditation and exercise, and building a network of mentors older and wiser than himself.
His full name is Jatinder Giri. In professional contexts, he goes by JT - two initials that have become a small piece of Bay Area cloud infrastructure lore.