Blocks
Berlin, DE · 26 employees on LinkedIn · 2 known investors
Blocks provides a cloud cost management and financial operations tool focused on helping organizations control and optimize their AWS cloud spending. It is an official AWS partner with a Cloud Financial Operations competency.
Also known as Blocks.cloud
Investors · 2
Company profile
researched Aug 2026Blocks is a Berlin-based company that helps organizations reduce and control their Amazon Web Services spending. Customers connect their AWS account by granting read-only access to cost and usage data, and can additionally join via AWS Billing Transfer; the company states that no infrastructure changes, code access, root access or account migration are required. Before commitment, prospects receive a savings estimate, and the company advertises a guaranteed 20% reduction in AWS costs.
The product combines two mechanisms. The first is group buying: Blocks aggregates the cloud spend of many member companies to negotiate volume discounts, which it says always unlock at least a 20% discount. The second is an agentic DevOps assistant branded "Major Tom," which continuously scans a customer's cloud environment for waste, misconfiguration and security exposure, and surfaces findings and Terraform-based fixes in Slack — for example, flagging an idle NAT gateway, an EC2 instance with SSH open to the internet, or answering ad-hoc questions such as P95 latency across customer-facing load balancers. According to press coverage, the service optimizes EC2, ECS, EKS, Fargate, Lambda, RDS, ElastiCache and DynamoDB. Blocks is an official AWS partner holding the Cloud Financial Operations Competency.
Founding story
Blocks was founded by Oliver Merkel and Andreas Schroeter. Merkel previously scaled Flink to unicorn status as CEO, while Schroeter brings two decades of infrastructure experience and built the Major Tom agent.
Business model
Blocks charges no setup fees or subscriptions and instead takes a share of the savings it generates. The 5% group buying discount is passed to the customer in full; on savings plans Blocks takes 25% of the savings realized; on one-off optimizations it takes the first month of the saving, after which the saving accrues entirely to the customer. The Major Tom agent and security findings are provided free. The company states there are no long-term contracts and that it absorbs downside risk if usage shifts.
Performance-based: a percentage of realized cloud savings (25% of savings on savings plans, the first month of savings on one-off optimizations), with no subscription or setup fees.
Traction
The company reports being trusted by more than 100 growth companies and is hiring senior fullstack, AI/LLM and backend data engineers in Berlin at total compensation of up to EUR 160K.
Latest developments
In April 2026 Blocks raised $6 million in pre-seed funding led by Speedinvest with participation from Caesar Ventures and technology founders, intended to expand operations, development efforts and business reach.
▸Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market, geography
Market position
Positions itself as a cloud financial operations provider combining aggregated purchasing power with autonomous optimization, and holds an official AWS partner designation with Cloud Financial Operations Competency.
Combines aggregated group purchasing across many customers with an always-on AI agent, a guaranteed 20% savings claim, no required infrastructure or code changes, no long-term lock-in, and a fee model tied to savings rather than spend.
Technology
An agentic DevOps system called Major Tom continuously monitors connected AWS accounts, identifying cost waste, misconfigurations and security risks, and delivering recommendations with Terraform code changes and verification of realized savings through a Slack interface. It can also answer operational queries such as load balancer latency percentiles. Access is read-only over AWS cost and usage data, with optional AWS Billing Transfer for membership.
Go-to-market
Self-serve sign-up with one-click read-only AWS access and a pre-commitment savings estimate, alongside a booked demo motion. Membership is positioned as a curated community restricted to growth companies, with each additional member increasing the aggregated buying power of the network. Founder visibility through podcast and conference appearances (Founder Mode, OMR Daily, Hinterland of Things) supports awareness.
Growth-stage companies running workloads on AWS; the company states it serves over 100 growth companies and limits membership to that segment.
Geography
Headquartered and built in Berlin, Germany; the product addresses AWS environments including the eu-central-1 region.
Compiled by commissioned research from 8 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.
Competitors · 3
by search overlap
Companies competing with Blocks for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
Timeline · 2
launches, deals, and filingsBerlin-based Blocks raised $6 million in pre-seed funding led by Speedinvest, with participation from Caesar Ventures and tech founders, to expand operations, development and business reach.
$6M source ↗
Blocks states it is an official AWS partner holding the Cloud Financial Operations Competency.
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
▸Research sources · 8
primary sources listed
- Blocksblocks.cloud · web
8 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Blocks do?
- Berlin-based AWS cost optimization startup using an agentic DevOps assistant and aggregated group buying to cut cloud bills.
- Who are Blocks's investors?
- Blocks's investors include BLN Capital, Caesar Ventures.
- Where is Blocks headquartered?
- Blocks is headquartered in Berlin, DE.