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🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week: Vantage
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✍️ Notes From The Editors
We're excited to present this week's article, guest-written by Aqil Pasha! You can check out Aqil's work on his substack and on Twitter where he writes more on startups and emerging technology trends.
Are you a newsletter founder who might also be interested in guest writing for Unicorner? Reply to this email and let us know—it's our way of supporting the 🦄 community.
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Vantage is a modern self-service platform for analyzing and reducing Amazon Web Services cloud costs. AWS provides infrastructure services to end users over the internet. With Vantage, cloud users onboard with a few clicks and are immediately able to visualize their current and predicted cloud spend, down to the service and account levels. Vantage’s vision is to be the central platform for managing cloud costs by expanding across both other cloud providers (Google Cloud Platform, Azure) and third-party services like Datadog, Cloudflare, and Sumo Logic.
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💰 Business Model
Vantage offers monthly subscriptions with multiple tiers available. All tiers offer aggregated cloud spend metrics and recommendations. Paid plans cover more categories and provide community access. Vantage offers 3 standard plans: The Free tier for customers who spend less than $2,500 per month on AWS, the $30/month for Pro Tier users who spend up to $7,500 per month, and the $200/month Business tier for users who spend up to $20K monthly. Custom plans are offered to those who spend more than $20K monthly on AWS.
📈 Traction and Fundraising
- Raised $4 million Seed round led by a16z, with participation from a series of angel investors including Brianne Kimmel, Julia Lipton, and Stephanie Friedman
- Launched Cost Savings Recommendations, AWS Cost Leaderboard, and Cloudflare-specific cost recommendation features within one month of fundraising to deepen cloud cost transparency
👫 Founder(s)
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Ben Schaechter, CEO: Previously Product Manager @ IEX, Senior Technical Product Manager @ AWS, Senior Product Manager @ DigitalOcean, Co-founder @ Mazuma Labs, Management Information Systems @ Creighton University
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Brooke McKim, CTO: Previously Head of Product @ Stae, Director of Product Management @ DigitalOcean, IT @ Drexel University
🔮 Our Analysis
The cloud has been a boon for companies because it has dramatically simplified the process of setting up a software tool like a website or an application. But increased adoption has brought increased costs and complexity. For example, public cloud infrastructure costs are projected to surge past $100 billion this year. However, research estimates 30% of this money is wasted. While AWS’s 200+ services enable companies to do more with less, the sheer volume of services makes cost reporting, research, and optimization a near-impossible task. Cloud providers offer nascent reporting tools, partners like CloudHealth and Cloudability have limited coverage scope, and developers don’t have the time to cobble together custom spend solutions. That’s where Vantage can shine. By taking a modern and self-service approach to simplifying holistic cloud spend analysis, Vantage delivers accessible optimization to busy developers across industries. As cloud spend becomes a primary management metric, competition will heat up. There is undoubtedly risk with entrenched incumbents (cloud provider-native tools, CloudHealth, etc.) and upcoming players, but Vantage’s laser focus on a simple UX should set them on a solid path in the growing “FinOps”, or Cloud Financial Operations, market.
📚 Further Reading
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Made with 💜 by the Unicorner Team 🦄
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🎁 Bonus Content!
Did you know Elon Musk reportedly uses a 375 square foot prefabricated house as his primary residence? You can learn more about the house and all things prefab in this recent Business Insider article. |
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