Case Study
How PointFive Partnered With Salesforce Ventures And Landed One of its Biggest Customers
the opportunity
Help Engineers Optimize Cloud Cost
Alon Arvatz believes in being economical. The Israeli entrepreneur launched his career at Tel Aviv University, where he studied accounting and law, founded his first business (the cybersecurity startup IntSights, which was acquired by Rapid7 for $350 million in 2021), and created the non-profit organization Kansai Kesef, which promotes financial literacy. At Rapid7, Alon’s passion for savings and efficiency made him a natural fit to help the organization optimize its cloud spend. However, he quickly noticed a disconnect:
“We had the tools to help us understand how much we were spending on cloud across products, teams, and services, and how it stacked up against the budget — all the financial questions,” Alon said. “But it did very little to help us as engineers with cloud cost optimization. We want to know what we can do about cloud costs and how we can better run our infrastructure, and the output there was very generic.”
To optimize cloud cost, Alon and his team had to manually collect and analyze data in an effort to identify wastefulness. But through this painful process, his team had an idea: what if there was a platform that can help engineers manage infrastructure efficiency alongside reliability and security? Alon and co-founders Gal Ben David and Amir Hozez began tinkering on this idea in 2022, and ultimately launched PointFive in 2023 with a new category of service they called “cloud efficiency posture management.”
“We promised to connect to our customers’ cloud environment, map out all the inefficiencies, and then streamline remediation,” Alon said. “PointFive gives your engineers recommendations along with technical and in-depth context, making it easy for them to take action.”
Alon and co. worked with large enterprises — known for having complex cloud infrastructures — to design their solution, and they immediately became their best customers. With a handful of enterprises on their client roster, Alon set out to raise a Series A in 2024 to amplify PointFive’s offering (at the time, they only supported clients running on AWS) and build out a go-to-market operation that could get them in the door with more enterprise customers.
SAlesforce Ventures are just all-arounders. They’re always leaning in, always seeing where they can provide help, and that really helps us build momentum as we look towards the future of the business.
Alon Arvatz, CEO & co-Founder, PointFive
the solution
Partner With a VC That Knows Enterprise GTM
For their Series A, Alon and his team sought investment partners who could help facilitate their growth and who were recommended by people they trusted.
“Three or four different founder friends mentioned Salesforce Ventures to me, and that was obviously an amazing signal,” Alon said. “Not just that they’re great people to work with, but also that they deliver on what they promise.”
At the same time, Salesforce Ventures had been conducting research into cloud efficiency solutions, having realized that this was a routine challenge for engineering teams at enterprises. We reached out to PointFive while the business was still in stealth mode, as we believed their DeepWaste Detection engine represented a significant improvement over other solutions on the market. When PointFive was ready to raise, we reconnected with Alon and met with him and his founding team.
“It’s very important for me to work with people that I like and people that I feel like I can have a meaningful, deep conversation with,” Alon said. “During our initial meeting, I felt like Salesforce Ventures really understood our space and the potential of our company. Later your team prepared competitive research on our industry, which was also very helpful.”
As a VC with deep ties to the enterprise and a global platform across the U.S., Europe and Asia, our team felt we could be a major asset to PointFive in reaching more enterprise customers seeking to enhance engineering efficiency. Ultimately, in November of 2024, we led PointFive’s $20M Series A round.
the impact
High-Value Connections
As partners, Salesforce Ventures has endeavored to support PointFive in a handful of different ways. First, we’ve sought to leverage our extensive network of enterprise leaders to make warm introductions on behalf of PointFive, including hosting a Demo Day where Alon and team demoed their product to a group of enterprise technology leaders.
“The day after we signed the deal with Salesforce Ventures, the team sent us a list of companies that might have an interest in PointFive’s solution that they could connect us with,” Alon said. “This is non-trivial because the market is so crowded and noisy and we are just one startup. The fact that we have folks from Salesforce Ventures vouch for us goes a long way, and lets these prospects know that we are enterprise-ready. It’s a head start over the competition.”
The Demo Day, organized by Salesforce Ventures’ Portfolio Development team, connected PointFive with Koch Industries and their subsidiary, Infor. That meeting kickstarted a sales process that culminated only four months later, with Infor becoming one of PointFive’s largest customers to date. “That doesn’t happen without Salesforce Ventures,” Alon said.
Beyond customers, Salesforce Ventures has also sought to help PointFive scale operations. As experts in enterprise GTM, our team has been able to connect PointFive with several candidates across sales and finance that have gone on to assume key roles within the organization. As a fast-growing company, Alon has also sought partners for subsequent rounds of funding. Here, our team has been able to make warm introductions to VCs we feel can be an asset to PointFive as it continues to scale, and also provide guidance around how to structure the round. What’s more, as a member of the Salesforce ecosystem, Alon was invited to speak on a panel about AI infrastructure at this year’s Dreamforce.
“I have investors who are great with recruiting, and I have investors who are great at customer introductions, but Salesforce Ventures are just all-arounders,” Alon said.”They’re always leaning in, always seeing where they can provide help, and that really helps us build momentum as we look towards the future of the business.”
50 → 90
Employees
5 → 12
Enterprise Customers
the future
Expanding for the AI Age
Today, PointFive is going as strong as ever. Since our investment, PointFive has grown from 50 to 90 employees, has expanded to support clients running on Azure and Google Cloud, and has grown its enterprise customer base from 5 clients to a dozen. However, Alon believes the business still has so much further to go, especially with cloud costs exploding in light of the AI boom.
“There is a huge and growing market here,” Alon said. “So what excites me most is just the size of our opportunity.”
PointFive has ambitions to continue expanding its platform beyond anomaly detection and cost optimization to cost management and other infrastructure efficiency-related use cases. The Salesforce Ventures team plans to be a key player in PointFive’s future endeavors, supporting their vision to become the go-to intelligence layer for managing cloud costs and performance at scale.
“It’s great to have partners who want your success as much as you do,” Alon said. “Loving what you’re doing and enjoying working with the people you’re doing it with is what it’s all about.”
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