Companies don’t necessarily have to produce breakthrough technology to gain market traction. Undercutting rivals on price can be enough to make a dent in a competitive sector. So can leaning on connections to land customers in need of a timely solution to a problem.

nOps is an example of this. Like countless other vendors, nOps sells software designed to “optimize” the budgets that businesses allocate to cloud products and services. But the firm has managed to expand faster — and bigger — than many of its rivals, perhaps in part because it serves AWS customers exclusively.

nOps claims that its customer base grew 450% over the past 18 months and that it’s helping clients manage more than $1.5 billion in AWS cloud spend. That’s evidently impressed investors; this month, nOps closed a $30 million Series A funding round led by PE firm Headlight Partners, which brought nOps’ total raised to $40.5 million.

JT Giri, the founder and CEO of nOps, got his start in the cloud industry as a network engineer and DevOps consultant. In 2012, he decided to take those skills and co-found a consulting company, nClouds, focused on AWS solutions. nOps launched as a spin-out from nClouds in 2017, and after Charles Thayne Capital acquired nClouds in 2022, Giri turned his attention to nOps full time.

“There’s a growing issue in the cloud space,” Giri told TechCrunch. “As companies tighten budgets ahead of fiscal 2025 planning, a solution providing a comprehensive, automated view of cloud costs is critical.”

To Giri’s point, efficient cloud usage remains an aspiration, not a reality, for many companies, particularly as companies invest more in cloud-hosted AI projects. (Gartner projects that spending on cloud services will reach $675.4 billion in 2024, up from $561 billion in 2023.) In a 2024 Statista survey, 84% of organizations said that they found managing cloud spend to be a “significant” challenge thanks to blockers around governance, security and tech expertise.

nOps tackles cloud optimization roadblocks from a few different angles. It generates dashboards and reports showing all of a company’s AWS spend, and it automatically handles tasks that could potentially deliver savings. That includes steps like resource scheduling and “rightsizing,” stopping idle instances and containers, and dynamically adjusting storage volumes.

“nOps uses AI and machine learning to analyze compute needs and automatically optimize for efficiency, reliability and cost,” Giri said. “For most of its products, nOps has a unique and flexible pricing structure where it doesn’t get paid until the client saves money; nOps receives a percentage of the cost saved.”

Giri wouldn’t say where nOps stands in terms of revenue, nor would he say exactly how many customers nOps has today. But he implied that the Series A positions the startup well for the coming months.

So what’s next for nOps? Giri says that the plan is to grow headcount from 60 employees today to 80 by the end of the year, and to build new integrations with AWS products and open source cost optimization tools.

“In our experience processing more than $1.5B in AWS cloud spend, 30% of cloud cost is waste and 20% leverages on-demand, the most expensive purchase type, leaving a massive opportunity for organizations to reduce their monthly cloud costs,” Giri said. “nOps offers insights, identifies inefficiencies and enables resource optimization through built-in automation or single-click changes.”

Companies don’t necessarily have to produce breakthrough technology to gain market traction. Undercutting rivals on price can be enough to make a dent in a competitive sector. So can leaning on connections to land customers in need of a timely solution to a problem.

nOps is an example of this. Like countless other vendors, nOps sells software designed to “optimize” the budgets that businesses allocate to cloud products and services. But the firm has managed to expand faster — and bigger — than many of its rivals, perhaps in part because it serves AWS customers exclusively.

nOps claims that its customer base grew 450% over the past 18 months and that it’s helping clients manage more than $1.5 billion in AWS cloud spend. That’s evidently impressed investors; this month, nOps closed a $30 million Series A funding round led by PE firm Headlight Partners, which brought nOps’ total raised to $40.5 million.

JT Giri, the founder and CEO of nOps, got his start in the cloud industry as a network engineer and DevOps consultant. In 2012, he decided to take those skills and co-found a consulting company, nClouds, focused on AWS solutions. nOps launched as a spin-out from nClouds in 2017, and after Charles Thayne Capital acquired nClouds in 2022, Giri turned his attention to nOps full time.

“There’s a growing issue in the cloud space,” Giri told TechCrunch. “As companies tighten budgets ahead of fiscal 2025 planning, a solution providing a comprehensive, automated view of cloud costs is critical.”

To Giri’s point, efficient cloud usage remains an aspiration, not a reality, for many companies, particularly as companies invest more in cloud-hosted AI projects. (Gartner projects that spending on cloud services will reach $675.4 billion in 2024, up from $561 billion in 2023.) In a 2024 Statista survey, 84% of organizations said that they found managing cloud spend to be a “significant” challenge thanks to blockers around governance, security and tech expertise.

nOps tackles cloud optimization roadblocks from a few different angles. It generates dashboards and reports showing all of a company’s AWS spend, and it automatically handles tasks that could potentially deliver savings. That includes steps like resource scheduling and “rightsizing,” stopping idle instances and containers, and dynamically adjusting storage volumes.

“nOps uses AI and machine learning to analyze compute needs and automatically optimize for efficiency, reliability and cost,” Giri said. “For most of its products, nOps has a unique and flexible pricing structure where it doesn’t get paid until the client saves money; nOps receives a percentage of the cost saved.”

Giri wouldn’t say where nOps stands in terms of revenue, nor would he say exactly how many customers nOps has today. But he implied that the Series A positions the startup well for the coming months.

So what’s next for nOps? Giri says that the plan is to grow headcount from 60 employees today to 80 by the end of the year, and to build new integrations with AWS products and open source cost optimization tools.

“In our experience processing more than $1.5B in AWS cloud spend, 30% of cloud cost is waste and 20% leverages on-demand, the most expensive purchase type, leaving a massive opportunity for organizations to reduce their monthly cloud costs,” Giri said. “nOps offers insights, identifies inefficiencies and enables resource optimization through built-in automation or single-click changes.”