Sedai Inc., a startup that helps enterprises make their cloud environments more reliable and cost-efficient, has raised $20 million in fresh funding.

The Series B round was announced today. Atlantic Vantage Point led the raise with participation from Norwest, Sierra Ventures and Uncorrelated Ventures. The investment follows a year in which Sedai claims to have grown revenues sevenfold, off an undisclosed base.

San Francisco-based Sedai provides a platform that uses artificial intelligence agents to optimize cloud environments. According to the company, its software can reduce the cost of running off-premises Kubernetes clusters by up to 65%. It also promises to provide double-digit latency improvements in some cases.

One common source of inefficiency in cloud environments is that workloads are sometimes deployed inside an instance with more hardware resources than they require. As a result, some of those resources are left unused, which incurs unnecessary costs. Sedai says its platform automatically picks the most efficient instance type for each workload to avoid hardware underutilization.

Cloud operators often provide discounts if a customer commits to renting an instance for an extended period of time. According to Sedai, its platform highlights such offers to help organizations lower their cloud expenses. Furthermore, it can prevent hardware usage spikes that may lead to budget overruns.

In addition to lowering the cost of customers’ cloud environments, Sedai promises to make them more reliable.

A sudden increase in user request volumes can take an application offline or slow its performance. According to Sedai, its AI models analyze historical application usage data to anticipate traffic spikes. The software then provisions additional infrastructure to accommodate the increased usage.

Sedai also promises to mitigate technical issues that stem from faulty software updates. Before developers release a new piece of code to production, the platform generates a risk score that indicates the likelihood of malfunctions. The platform can determine whether the update will increase cloud costs, reduce application performance or cause other errors.

Sedai’s platform doubles as an analytics tool. It allows finance teams to break down their organization’s cloud spending by team, project and service. The software also tracks how usage changes over time.

Sedai says that it manages more than $1.2 billion in cloud spend for customers. Since the launch of its platform, the company’s AI models have carried out more than 25 million “autonomous actions” in those customers’ production environments. Sedai says that its installed base includes Palo Alto Networks Inc., HP Inc. and other major tech firms.

The company will invest its newly raised funding in product development. Sedai plans to release features for optimizing graphics card clusters and applications powered by large language models. Additionally, it’s working on an AI tool for managing deployments of cloud data platforms such as Snowflake. Sedai intends to grow its go-to-market team in conjunction.

Photo: Unsplash