Aquila Clouds helps enterprises control spiraling cloud and AI costs with its comprehensive management platform that optimizes spending, security, and performance.
As organizations increasingly adopt cloud and AI technologies, many struggle with rapidly escalating costs and complex billing challenges. Pleasanton, California-based Aquila Clouds has developed a cloud and AI management platform to help enterprises optimize spending while maintaining security and performance. I had the opportunity to learn more about this company during the 60th IT Press Tour.
"More than 90% of CIOs said that managing cost limits their ability to get value from AI for their enterprise," explained Suchit Kaura, CEO and co-founder of Aquila Clouds, citing recent Gartner research. "Gartner believes that cost is as high an AI risk as security or hallucinations."
The company, founded in 2020, provides a platform that addresses three key challenges organizations face: controlling cloud and infrastructure costs, ensuring data security, and implementing usage-based billing. With customers spending millions on services like Databricks, OpenAI, Amazon SageMaker, and other AI platforms, having visibility and control over these expenses has become critical.
The Aquila Clouds platform consists of two main components:
FinOps - A cloud financial management platform that provides:
Real-time observability of cloud usage, costs, and performance metrics
AI/ML-powered optimization recommendations for right-sizing resources
Governance features for cost allocation and budgeting
Collaboration tools for IT and finance teams
BillOps - A billing management platform that helps managed service providers and cloud resellers:
Automate multi-cloud billing operations
Customize pricing models and product catalogs
Process complex usage-based billing scenarios
Centralize billing across multiple cloud providers
"We're focused on saving cloud costs for customers, but we're elevating the whole story to doing all the automation for you so that your AI workloads can run on the cloud securely, cost-effectively, and with a swift time to market," explained Desmond Chan, CPO, and co-founder.
The company has seen significant results with existing customers. In one case study with a major energy company, Aquila Clouds helped:
Reduce cloud spend by 15-20%
Increase project-level visibility by 10-15%
Accelerate forecasting and budget decisions by 10-12%
Speed up financial decision-making by 15-20%
Unlike point solutions focused on specific aspects of cloud management, Aquila Clouds takes a holistic approach that combines automation, optimization, security, and AI capabilities. The platform supports major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, and VMware environments.
The platform's ability to handle traditional cloud infrastructure and modern AI workloads is a key differentiator. "When you enter the cloud, agility came into being with something like a GPU instance," noted Kaura. "If you're running any of the data workloads, AI workloads, you're spending a lot of money."
The company's name comes from Aquila, a constellation representing an eagle. "This eagle can spot an ant moving from a 100-story building," explained Kaura. "So we named the company Aquila because we enable clients to see things they don't see on your website."
Rather than selling to technical teams, Aquila Clouds targets financial decision-makers who feel the pain of cloud costs most acutely. "Never sell to IT. I'm a technical person, I'm never going to sell to a technical person," said Kaura. "The pain is much higher for the person who's writing the check."
The company has raised funding from friends and family investors and is closing a venture capital round. With approximately 80 global customers and partnerships with major players like Wipro, the company has doubled its revenue and team size. Average deal sizes range from $50,000 to over $1 million.
Looking ahead, Aquila Clouds is expanding its capabilities around confidential computing and AI workload optimization. The platform already supports specialized use cases like GPU optimization and can help organizations determine whether workloads require expensive GPU instances.
As AI adoption accelerates, managing the associated cloud costs becomes increasingly critical. According to Gartner, the AI software market is expected to reach $297 billion by 2027. Aquila Clouds aims to help organizations optimize spending across this growing AI and cloud services ecosystem.
"For the second year in a row, managing cloud spend topped security as the top challenge facing all organizations," noted Chan, citing industry research. With its comprehensive platform for cloud financial management and billing automation, Aquila Clouds is positioning itself to help enterprises tackle this persistent challenge while enabling them to adopt transformative AI capabilities.
The company competes with various point solutions but differentiates through its holistic approach, which combines financial management, security, and AI workload optimization in a single platform. As organizations struggle to contain cloud costs while accelerating AI initiatives, Aquila Clouds' unified approach to cloud and AI management could prove increasingly valuable.
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