cost-optimization
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Coralogix Wants to Kill the Observability Tax - Without Throwing Away the Data
The $1.6 billion observability company made a contrarian bet: analyze telemetry before storage, leave the archive in the customer's cloud, and stop charging as if every log line deserves a penthouse. AI may turn that cost argument into infrastructure strategy.
Understudy Labs
Understudy Labs is a San Francisco AI infrastructure startup (Y Combinator S26) that helps data-rich teams replace expensive frontier LLMs with smaller, specialized models they own. Its open-source toolkit captures production traces from existing agent workflows, benchmarks cheaper open-weight models against them, and only ships a replacement once a held-out evaluation beats the incumbent - promising comparable quality at a fraction of the cost and latency.
Cledara
Cledara is a software management and spend platform that helps growing companies discover, buy, manage and cancel their SaaS subscriptions from one place. By pairing virtual cards with a system of record for every application, Cledara gives finance and IT teams real-time visibility into software costs and usage, automates invoice collection and accounting, and enforces approval workflows. Founded in 2018 by Cristina Vila Vives and Brad van Leeuwen, it serves 1,000+ customers across 32 countries.
DualBird
DualBird is a Boston-based data infrastructure company building a cloud-native engine that brings hardware-grade acceleration to big data and AI workloads. By running rewritable FPGA silicon on AWS as a software service, DualBird plugs into existing Apache Spark and Apache Iceberg pipelines and claims 10-100x faster processing at 50-90% lower cost, without asking teams to change their code or workflows. The company raised $25M in combined Seed and Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in November 2025.
Gembah
Gembah is an Austin-based product development platform and marketplace that helps entrepreneurs, e-commerce sellers, and small-to-midsize businesses take physical products from idea to shelf. It connects creators with a global network of vetted designers, engineers, and supply chain specialists, and manages design, prototyping, factory sourcing, and production across regions including China, Vietnam, India, Mexico, and Eastern Europe - aiming to demystify and democratize the process of bringing new consumer products to market.
Torii
Torii is a SaaS Management Platform (SMP) that helps IT and finance teams discover, optimize, and govern the software running across their organization. Founded in 2016 by three serial entrepreneurs, Torii pioneered a discovery-first approach that surfaces shadow IT - and, more recently, shadow AI - through browser extensions, SSO, direct integrations, and financial data. On top of that visibility it layers spend analytics, license optimization, and no-code automation for tasks like onboarding, offboarding, and renewals. Headquartered in New York with R&D in Israel, Torii counts customers such as Instacart, Bumble, and Palo Alto Networks, and was named a Leader in Gartner's 2025 Magic Quadrant for SaaS Management Platforms.
Vantage
Vantage is a New York-based cloud cost management platform that helps engineering and finance teams analyze, report on, and reduce their cloud, SaaS, and AI spend. Founded in 2020 by former DigitalOcean and AWS product leaders, Vantage consolidates billing data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and 20+ providers - including OpenAI and Anthropic - into a single self-service interface built for developers, not just FinOps specialists.
Last9
Last9 is a unified observability company that helps engineering and DevOps teams monitor high-cardinality metrics, logs, and traces without the ballooning costs of legacy tools. Built around a Prometheus- and OpenTelemetry-compatible telemetry warehouse called Levitate and a pre-ingestion Control Plane that filters, reshapes, and routes data, Last9 has been used to observe some of the largest live-streaming events in the world - including peaks of roughly 59-61 million concurrent viewers. Founded in 2020 and backed by Sequoia/Peak XV's Surge, Better Capital and others, it targets cost-efficient, full-fidelity observability at enterprise scale.
LevaData
LevaData is an enterprise SaaS company that builds an AI-powered supply management platform for direct-materials procurement. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Pleasanton, California, its Cognitive Supply Management platform blends a company's bill of materials and sourcing objectives with real-time market data covering over a billion parts and tens of thousands of suppliers to recommend cost savings, flag risks, and speed up new product introduction. It counts manufacturers and OEMs among its customers and raised a $47M Series C in 2021 led by Banneker Partners.
Serverless Inc.
Serverless Inc. is a San Francisco software company that builds the Serverless Framework, one of the most widely used open-source tools for deploying applications to AWS Lambda and other cloud functions. Founded in 2015 by Austen Collins, it turned a solo open-source project called JAWS into a de facto standard for infrastructure-as-code in the function-as-a-service era, then layered commercial products - a dashboard, observability, and a subscription license - on top for larger teams.
Pump.co
Pump.co is a San Francisco-based AI cloud platform that pools AWS commitments across hundreds of startups to deliver enterprise-grade discounts - up to 60% off - with no engineering work or long contracts. Founded in 2022 and backed by Y Combinator, it has grown into a multi-product 'intelligent cloud' covering cost optimization, visibility, and security.
TrueFoundry
TrueFoundry is a San Francisco-based enterprise agentic AI platform that helps Fortune 1000 companies deploy, govern, and scale AI and machine learning applications. Founded in 2021 by former Meta engineers from IIT Kharagpur, it provides an end-to-end MLOps/LLMOps platform covering model deployment, AI gateway, model registry, prompt lifecycle management, and observability - all on the customer's own infrastructure with SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance. With $21.3M in total funding led by Intel Capital and Peak XV, TrueFoundry's platform manages 1,000+ clusters, processes 10+ billion monthly API requests, and delivers 40-50% infrastructure cost reductions for customers including Siemens Healthineers, ResMed, NVIDIA, and Automation Anywhere.