Cloud Capital Secures $7.7M Funding to Put CFOs Back in Control of Cloud Spend

As AI drives up cloud usage faster than finance teams can manage, Cloud Capital is building the first finance-focused platform for the cloud. It helps companies predict cloud usage, save money, and avoid financial risks from long-term cloud contracts.

The company was founded by Edward Barrow (CEO), Spencer Pingry (CTO), and Zack Liscio (CPO)—a team of serial entrepreneurs who have built and sold successful SaaS startups in the US and Europe, like Idio, Zaius, and Naytev. They later worked together at Optimizely, where they saw how hard it was to manage cloud spending at scale.

Together, they've managed over $500 million in cloud costs, and they started Cloud Capital to fix the problems they’ve faced themselves.

“We believe cloud infrastructure is the largest broken market in tech,” said Edward Barrow, Co-founder & CEO. “We’ve been in the driving seat; we’ve built the forecasts and we’ve lived the pain. We built Cloud Capital to give CFOs the same level of control over cloud that they have across the rest of the P&L.”

As companies race to train and launch AI models, cloud usage is exploding. By the end of 2024, global cloud spending is expected to hit $344 billion, growing more than 20% every year. At this rate, cloud costs could reach over $1 trillion by 2030.

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To keep up, big cloud providers are quickly building more capacity. In 2024, global spending on data centers jumped 51% to $455 billion, much of it going toward AI-friendly infrastructure. But here’s the catch: these cloud providers rely on customers signing long-term contracts, which means the financial risk gets pushed onto the buyers.

For CFOs, it’s a perfect storm: cloud is now the second-largest cost after headcount – typically 6% to 12% of revenue in SaaS businesses, and as high as 30% to 40% in AI-native companies³. With the rapid growth of these investments, 27% of companies are now exceeding their cloud budgets, and up to 40% of potential savings remain unrealized.

Responsibility for managing cloud costs often falls on engineering teams, yet the financial accountability lies between CFOs and CTOs, neither of whom have the tools to forecast or manage these expenses with confidence.​

“Cloud has always been a massive cost center but, with AI workloads driving usage through the roof, it’s become the fastest growing and least controlled line item on the P&L,” said Zack Liscio, Co-founder & CPO. “CFOs are being asked to approve major cloud investments without the visibility or control to manage the risk. We built Cloud Capital to give them the tools they need to forecast spend, manage risk, and make smarter decisions.”

“Cloud Capital is shifting the dynamic and giving finance leaders the tools to run cloud like any other major investment. Unlike traditional optimization tools, Cloud Capital takes a "100% FinTech" approach to cloud infrastructure, treating it like a financial asset, not just an engineering cost, precisely quantifying and pricing commitment risk based on our proprietary, free-to-use forecasting platform,” said Spencer Pingry, Co-founder & CTO.

“Other tools help engineers save money. We help CFOs manage risk. We’re building financial infrastructure - a control layer for cloud that gives companies a new way to finance and optimize cloud like any other major investment.”

“Cloud Capital is tackling one of the most urgent and overlooked problems in tech: the lack of financial control in cloud infrastructure,” said Rory Stirling, Partner at Connect Ventures. “We backed this team because they’ve lived the problem, and they’re building with a clarity and conviction that only comes from first-hand experience. They’re not just optimizing costs, they’re reshaping the financial infrastructure of the cloud era.”

About Cloud Capital

Cloud Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage startups in the cloud economy. They focus on companies in India, the US, and Southeast Asia, mainly investing during the Seed stage. Cloud Capital works closely with founders, supporting them through the long journey of building and scaling their businesses.