columbia-maryland
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The Quiet Maryland Firm That Keeps Buying the Stores You Grew Up With
It bought Lids for less than half what it last sold for, rescued Claire's from liquidation, and calls itself a mini-Berkshire. Ames Watson would rather own a brand for thirty years than sell it in five.
Kion
Kion is a Columbia, Maryland software company that builds a self-hosted FinOps+ platform for managing cloud operations across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Founded in 2018 as cloudtamer.io and rebranded as Kion in 2021, the company combines cloud financial management, policy-based governance, and continuous compliance into a single platform that runs inside a customer's own cloud environment. Its software is used by commercial, higher-education, and government organizations - including NASA, the CDC, Verizon, and Indeed - to control cloud spend, enforce guardrails, and automate account provisioning through retirement.