The New York startup teaching engineering and finance to read the same cloud bill - across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and now AI.
Vantage's logo, photographed against a midnight-navy field - a small mark for a company built to make very large numbers legible.
Every engineer has felt the moment. The monthly cloud invoice lands, the number is larger than last month, and nobody in the room can say exactly why. For most of the past decade that mystery was simply accepted as the cost of building on the cloud. Vantage was founded in 2020 on the premise that it shouldn't be.
Vantage is a cloud cost management platform - part of the discipline the industry now calls FinOps - that helps teams analyze, allocate, and reduce what they spend across AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and a growing list of SaaS and AI providers. Its founders, Ben Schaechter and Brooke McKim, came out of product teams at DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services, where they watched customers struggle to understand infrastructure bills that ran to thousands of line items. The company they built applies the same instinct for simplicity to the least glamorous document in software: the invoice.
The distinction that defines Vantage is who it is built for. Most cost tools were designed for finance departments, presenting spend as a spreadsheet exercise conducted after the money was already gone. Vantage was designed for the developers who actually create the cost. Its interface is meant to be navigated without FinOps training, and that accessibility - not a longer feature list - is the argument it makes to the market.
Vantage consolidates billing data from more than twenty sources into a single view. Where the platform earns its keep is in translating that raw data into decisions - who owns a cost, whether it is growing abnormally, and what could be turned off.
Self-service analysis and allocation of multi-cloud spend by team, product, and feature.
Pod-level allocation mapped to namespaces, services, and labels with full cloud context.
Automated spike detection, budget tracking, and alerting before the bill surprises you.
Actionable savings guidance including savings plans and rightsizing.
Native OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor tracking by developer, model, and project.
An automated waste-elimination agent and MCP support to query costs from your IDE.
The core problem is visibility. A modern company might run workloads across three cloud providers, dozens of managed services, and a Kubernetes cluster that abstracts away the very servers being paid for. Container orchestration made deployment easy and cost invisible at the same time. Vantage's answer is to ingest all of it and attribute spend down to the unit - a customer, a feature, a team, or a single API key.
That last category has become urgent. As teams adopt large language models, a single OpenAI or Anthropic key can quietly rival a fleet of servers in monthly cost. By pulling token spend into the same dashboard as compute, Vantage lets organizations measure AI the way they measure everything else - against the whole bill, not in a separate tab.
Vantage's customers span from fast-growing startups to established brands. Named users include Square and its parent Block, PBS, FanDuel, PlanetScale, Barstool Sports, CircleCI, Canva, Rippling, HelloFresh, and Starburst. PlanetScale adopted the platform to centralize cost data and create a shared source of truth between engineering and finance - retiring the one-off Slack threads and custom SQL queries that used to answer cost questions.
In a crowded category that includes CloudZero, Kubecost, nOps, and Apptio Cloudability, Vantage stakes out the accessible end of the market. Where enterprise-first tools assume a dedicated FinOps team, Vantage assumes a developer who wants an answer in a few clicks. That positioning is deliberate, and it is reinforced by the company's quarterly Cloud Cost Report - a public benchmark built from anonymized customer usage that has become a reference point for what companies actually pay.
Vantage raised a $4M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2021, followed by a $21M Series A in March 2023 led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from a16z, Harpoon Ventures, Glenn Solomon, and Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince. When infrastructure insiders back an infrastructure tool, it is worth noting what they see.
Ben Schaechter and Brooke McKim launch the platform to simplify cloud cost management.
Andreessen Horowitz backs early product as budgets, alerts, and recommendations ship.
Quarterly benchmarks from anonymized customer usage begin.
Scale Venture Partners leads the round; Kubernetes cost reporting arrives.
Native OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor integrations bring token spend into the platform.
An automated waste-elimination agent, MCP support, and pod-level reporting ship.
Vantage is a cloud cost management platform that helps teams analyze, allocate, and optimize spend across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and 20+ SaaS and AI providers in one dashboard.
Vantage was founded in 2020 by Ben Schaechter (CEO) and Brooke McKim (CTO), former product leaders at DigitalOcean and AWS.
About $25M total - a $4M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 and a $21M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners in 2023.
Yes. Vantage offers native integrations for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor, with per-developer, per-model, and per-project token cost visibility alongside cloud spend.
Vantage aims to be the most accessible entry point - usable by developers without FinOps training - while still supporting multi-cloud, Kubernetes, SaaS, and AI cost data in one interface.