Yotascale

Yotascale is a cloud cost management and cloud infrastructure optimization software company founded in 2015 by Asim Razzaq, a former head of platform engineering and Senior Director of Platform Services Engineering at PayPal. The product is aimed at CloudOps and DevOps engineering teams and applies machine learning to cloud operations data to help them balance cost, performance and availability. Capabilities described in the sources include real-time anomaly detection, root-cause analysis, contextual analytics, continuous optimization, predictive capacity planning and actionable remediation recommendations, with workflow integrations into tools such as Slack, JIRA and PagerDuty.

At its 2018 platform launch, the company positioned the offering as "Autonomous Cloud Operations" — an analogy to a self-driving car, where routine cloud operations tasks are handled automatically and tuned to business priorities. Company materials state the platform processes more than a billion data points per hour, and a 2018 industry analyst comment described an AI model trained on 500 PB of cross-enterprise cloud operations data combined with live ingestion from cloud provider APIs and third-party configuration and performance management tools.

The company frames cloud cost as an engineering rather than purely finance problem, arguing that engineers and engineering leaders make the day-to-day decisions driving spend and should be given the relevant information at the point of decision. The CEO has also cited environmental impact of digital infrastructure as a future focus area. The company name derives from "yottabyte," with a letter dropped because the yottabyte domain was unavailable.

Founding story

Asim Razzaq grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, studied computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, and worked as a lead architect at a startup before stints at PayPal (from 2007), eBay (2011), Axcient, and a return to PayPal in 2013 as Senior Director of Platform Services Engineering. Experience building and managing large-scale infrastructure at eBay and PayPal exposed him to a lack of visibility into cloud spending. Before formally launching he conducted customer discovery interviews with data engineers at large companies to validate that the problem was widespread, then founded Yotascale in 2015. One source lists co-founders Abbas Yousafzai, Imran Moin and Michael Babiak alongside Razzaq.

Business model

Yotascale sells a software platform to enterprise engineering organizations that ingests cloud provider billing, usage, configuration and performance data and returns cost-allocation views, anomaly alerts, root-cause analysis and optimization recommendations. The sources indicate an enterprise software model with named production deployments at large customers and demos requested through the company website, but do not state pricing or contract structures.

Not specified in the sources beyond enterprise software sales. A third-party aggregator estimates annual revenue of approximately $4.5 million and revenue per employee of about $110,200; these are estimates, not disclosed figures.

Traction

By late 2018 the platform was in production at enterprise customers including AdRoll, Highfive, HomeAway, ProtectWise and Reltio. By February 2023 the CEO reported deployments at Zoom, Hulu, Okta, Compass and Klarna, roughly 50 employees, a doubling of annual run rate over the prior year, and net dollar retention of 184%. A third-party aggregator estimates 41 employees, 17% year-over-year headcount growth and about $4.5 million in annual revenue.

Latest developments

The most recent funding described in the sources is the October 2020 Series B. A February 2023 Forbes profile reported roughly 50 employees, total funding of $24.6 million over four rounds, a doubling of annual run rate in the prior year, net dollar retention of 184%, and customers including Zoom, Hulu, Okta, Compass and Klarna. The CEO identified the environmental footprint of digital infrastructure as an area of future focus.