The Story
The Routing Problem That Became a Business
The math was never complicated. Large companies negotiate three-year reserved instance contracts with AWS and pay 40-60% less than startups paying on-demand. Startups don't have three years of runway certainty to commit to. So they pay retail. Always.
Spandana Nakka noticed. Not as an outsider, but as someone who had spent four years at Google managing products that touched a billion users, evaluating which cities deserved fiber internet, and understanding at a cellular level how infrastructure pricing shapes what gets built and what doesn't. She saw the same unfairness pattern in cloud computing that she'd seen in broadband: big wins for the biggest payers, crumbs for everyone else.
By combining AI automated savings, an intuitive user experience, and our novel, completely free business model - Pump is democratizing AWS cost savings that historically only the very largest companies have had access to.- Spandana Nakka, Founder & CEO, Pump.co
Before Pump, there was Sleek. The startup Nakka co-founded in 2018 applied Uber's surge pricing logic to physical queues: if you're willing to pay a little more, you skip the line. Simple. Elegant. Mathematically obvious. Snackpass, the Series B startup backed by YC, Andreessen Horowitz, and First Round Capital, acquired Sleek in 2021. Nakka had her exit. She took a breath.
Then she founded Pump in March 2022, joined Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch, and started solving a problem she'd watched founders complain about for years: the AWS bill that grew faster than revenue, with no obvious way to fight back.
The Mechanics: Costco Meets Cloud
Pump's core innovation isn't AI, though it uses plenty. It's a reservation arbitrage system. When you buy an AWS Reserved Instance individually, you lock yourself into a one to three year commitment. Most startups can't absorb that risk. Pump pools hundreds of companies' cloud usage, rotates reserved instance commitments across them based on real-time demand, and passes the discount through - while capping any individual commitment to roughly one month.
The company covers 12 AWS services including EC2, RDS, and ECS. It became an AWS Advanced Tier Partner - a designation held by fewer than 1,000 companies worldwide. Pump operates with read-only permissions, meaning it never touches a customer's code or data. The product connects to a cloud account in under two minutes.
How Pump Works
The Savings Engine
Cloud Spend: What You Pay vs. What You Could Pay
* Illustrative. Actual savings vary by usage profile and region.
The Growth Playbook: 90% Inbound
When Pump launched publicly in 2023, it didn't have a traditional sales team. Nakka didn't run a cold-email campaign. She and her team posted on LinkedIn, Product Hunt, YC Slack, and startup forums. By her own account, 90% of early customers came inbound. Within six months, Pump had over 250 customers, including more than 50 Y Combinator companies.
Our leads were like 90% inbound at the beginning of Pump. Being active where your customers are is a huge advantage.- Spandana Nakka
India became the company's second-largest source of customer signups, fast enough that Pump had to incorporate Pump Billing Technologies India Private Limited as a local subsidiary in July 2023 - a requirement to resell AWS services in the region. Nakka became its director.
The company also launched PumpGPT, an AI assistant framed as a replacement for premium AWS support subscriptions. Then came a formal partnership with Techstars, extending Pump's savings to portfolio companies across Techstars' global network. The product suite now includes Pump Save (automated cost optimization), Pump View (spend analytics and forecasting), and Pump Secure (compliance scanning against industry frameworks).
The Path Here: From Osmania to Stanford to Google
Nakka is Indian-born, UAE-raised, and American-educated. She started with a bachelor's degree in Engineering from Osmania University in Hyderabad, crossed the Pacific as an exchange student at Caltech, and completed a Master's in Engineering Management at Stanford.
At Google, she joined in 2014 and spent four years on two of the company's most ambitious infrastructure plays. On Google Fiber, she evaluated cities for broadband expansion - a role that meant understanding how access to infrastructure shapes economic opportunity. On Google Play, she helped optimize apps for emerging markets, publishing a technical piece in the Google Play Apps & Games blog in 2017 on building for users in bandwidth-constrained environments. A signal she was already thinking about access, not just features.
She was one of Google Fiber's early female PMs. That's a data point worth holding onto - not as a talking point, but as context for the kind of rooms she was navigating before she had a company name to stand behind.