cloud-cost-optimization
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Aran Khanna
Aran Khanna is the co-founder and CEO of Archera, a Bellevue-based startup that helps companies cut cloud bills by guaranteeing deep discounts without locking them into long-term commitments, backed by insurance and reinsurance capacity. A Harvard computer science and math graduate, he first made headlines in 2015 when his Chrome extension Marauder's Map exposed a location-tracking flaw in Facebook Messenger and cost him a Facebook internship. He went on to research privacy at Harvard, build neural-network tools as an AI engineer at AWS, and co-found Archera in 2019 with his brother Nikhil.
JT Giri
JT Giri is the CEO and Founder of nOps, a San Francisco-based AI-powered cloud cost optimization platform that helps companies manage and reduce their AWS spend. After discovering Amazon EC2 in beta in 2006 and spending years as a hands-on DevOps consultant, he co-founded nClouds in 2012 - which grew into an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. In 2017 he spun out nOps to productize the cloud management tooling he'd built internally. In August 2024, nOps secured a $30M Series A led by Headlight Partners, with the platform now managing over $1.5 billion in AWS spend across a customer base that grew 450% in 18 months.
Maxim Melamedov
Maxim Melamedov is the CEO and co-founder of Zesty, a Palo Alto-based cloud infrastructure optimization platform that has raised $124M to help enterprises slash cloud costs through AI-driven autoscaling. Born in the Soviet Union, raised in Israel, and now operating out of Silicon Valley, Melamedov built Zesty from a 2019 insight - that 30-40% of cloud infrastructure sits idle while companies pay full price. With products spanning Kubernetes optimization, compute rightsizing, and commitment management, Zesty now manages billions in cloud waste across 1,000+ accounts for enterprise customers including Wiz, Armis, and WalkMe.
Spandana Nakka
Spandana Nakka is the Founder & CEO of Pump.co, a Y Combinator-backed startup that cuts AWS cloud bills by up to 60% for free using group buying and AI. Indian-origin, UAE-raised, and Stanford-educated, Nakka spent four years as one of Google's early female PMs on Google Fiber and Google Play before co-founding Sleek (acquired by Snackpass in 2021) and then building Pump in 2022. Featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 for Consumer Technology, she leads an 88-person team making enterprise-level cloud discounts accessible to startups that can't negotiate alone.