Ternary, a cloud spend management startup, raises $12M

Ternary, a platform that helps companies manage how much they’re spending on cloud resources across multiple public cloud providers, today announced that it raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by Jump Capital with participation from Fin Capital, RiverPark Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital and Gaingels.

Co-founder and CEO Sasha Kipervarg says that the new cash, which brings Ternary’s total raised to ~$20 million, will be put toward Ternary’s go-to-market efforts, scaling its revenue team and making “continued investments” in Ternary’s product development.

“Cloud spend is out of control across the industry,” Kipervarg, CEO, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The vast majority of compute is still inside data centers, but will eventually migrate to the cloud. Tools are needed to address the vast array of dynamic cloud services being used to build cloud infrastructure.”

Ternary’s co-founders — Kipervarg, Patrick Raymond and Joshua Kwan — met while working together on a massive cloud data migration project for LiveRamp, the software-as-a-service data connectivity and orchestration platform. They ended up overspending by $300 million — a problem they spent years triaging before deciding to build, as Kipervarg puts it, “the tool we wished we had during migration.”

Ternary falls under the category of FinOps, a once cottage industry that’s grown into a formidable sector as the demand for tools to keep track of — and cut back on — cloud costs grows.

According to a 2023 Wakefield Research report, nearly three out of 10 of developers, engineers and executives are prioritizing FinOps investments this year. Seventy-four percent of the respondents said they now consider FinOps to be as important as other established IT disciplines, such as DevOps and SecOps.

Ternary is going head to head with a host of other vendors in the FinOps market, including Exostellar, which in September netted $15 million for its set of tools designed to optimize “enterprise-level” cloud spend. CloudZero, Cast AI, ProsperOps, Finout, Vantage and Zesty are just a few of the other companies competing for a slice of the budding FinOps segment, which is projected to be worth $2.75 billion by 2023.

So what sets Ternary apart? A few things, Kipervarg asserts. 

“Ternary releases major functionality at agile pace. The incumbents are slow,” he said. “We’re built on top of native Google Cloud Platform serverless services and can process billions of dollars of cloud spend. We have infinite scale … Half of our team of 25 are early leaders from Cloudability, Cloudhealth and Cloudchkr. We know what to build and what not to build.”

Like other FinOps products, Ternary breaks down a company’s biggest cloud line items, suggesting ways to optimize costs and attempting to forecast spending. The platform ingests real-time billing data from cloud providers like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and Azure, showing the costs associated with various accounts and services as well as those related to software vendors and cloud service providers.

Ternary also recommends areas for cost reduction, employing “human-tunable” algorithms. The platform can be configured to alert customers when cloud costs reach a certain threshold or spike unexpectedly.

“Companies need FinOps guardrails to be able to spend responsibly and operate successfully in the cloud,” Kipervarg said. “We shine sunlight on an area of the company where there’s no instrumentation today.”

Ternary, which Kipervarg says is valued in the “two figures” with the latest funding round, has close to 250 customers. The plan is to grow headcount from 25 employees to 40 within the next year. 

“The broader slowdown in tech hasn’t resulted in a pause on cloud migrations,” Kipervarg said. “We had over 24 months of runway prior to the Series A and have an even longer runway today.”