Welcome, PointFive!
perspectives / Portfolio

Welcome, PointFive!

More efficient cloud infrastructure.

Kartik Gupta, Nowi Kallen and Sam Ackah-Yensu
November 12, 2024
  • Founders: Alon Arvatz, Gal Ben David, Amir Hozez
  • Sector: Cloud Infrastructure Management
  • Location: NYC / Tel Aviv

The Opportunity

The cloud is BIG and only getting bigger and more complex. It represents an engine of innovation, especially in the age of AI. While economic uncertainty is leading companies to reduce spending and look at cloud costs that have previously gone unchecked, the need for innovation and new revenue opportunities remains constant. 

This AI age is bringing together FinOps and DevOps / Platform engineering teams to work more closely in a symbiotic manner. Historically, the balance of power has oscilated between the two teams and there has been a broad realization that the existing way of managing and optimizing cloud resources is inefficient, resulting in unnecessary back and forth between engineering and finance teams and countless engineering hours wasted on predicting and forecasting cloud infrastructure needs.

We’ve spoken to several large enterprises who have adopted different cost optimization strategies, and learned that efficient resource management remains a major problem for most. The feedback usually centers around existing optimizations not being actionable, engineering teams missing the context around how each tweak in the efficiency equation changes the infrastructure, and the optimizations’ potential, sometimes unintended, outcomes. These issues create a divide in effort and efficiency of the FinOps vs. the Engineering teams. Thus, there’s a low-hanging level of optimization that is commonly adopted based on what’s provided as guidelines by the cloud providers, but going deeper and finding the meatier opportunities remains a challenge for another day. 

The Solution

PointFive is a cloud cost optimization platform designed to enhance engineering efficiency through its DeepWaste™ Detection Engine. This engine analyzes cloud infrastructure at a granular level, similar to how threat detection systems identify vulnerabilities in cybersecurity. This approach allows PointFive to surface inefficiencies, misconfigured infrastructure, and hidden resource waste that other tools might overlook. Its agentless, read-only solution continuously scans cloud environments, using advanced AI models and cyber-like cloud research methodologies to uncover saving opportunities and offer clear, automated pathways to remediate and optimize cost inefficiencies without disrupting engineering workflows.

Why We’re Backing PointFive

Our belief in PointFive starts with their founding team. Co-founders Alon, Gal, and Amir have worked together for the last 15 years across various security and engineering roles, while also co-founding IntSights which they sold to Rapid7. They come to PointFive with strong entrepreneurial backgrounds, a track record of building from scratch, deep technical expertise, and an outstanding reputation within the ecosystem. 

The team’s decades of experience building cybersecurity threat hunting and remediation products, combined with their expertise in cloud vulnerability research provides them with a very unique perspective into the cloud operations sector. They bring in the defensive and offensive DNAs from their prior work — but instead of finding security vulnerabilities, they’re focused on finding cloud operational inefficiencies. 

This background has helped them architect a very unique product — one that separates the engineering and the research such that the core engineering teams can focus on building the best cloud data and visibility platform that can crawl through every line of code to understand data and metadata along with the context of the architecture and its implications. The research team, on the other hand, can focus on using this data engine to productize the cloud cost optimizations built upon their proprietary research. 

But this is just the beginning. The PointFive team has a much bigger vision.

What’s Ahead?

PointFive isn’t just solving today’s problems; they’re building the foundation for tomorrow’s cloud operations management platform. Their data-driven approach, coupled with their deep understanding of cloud architecture, positions them to become a leader in the cloud operations space. They’re starting with cloud cost optimization, now turning to performance, followed by compliance and security, and much more. They’re all interconnected and interdependent — and should be treated, maintained, and optimized that way as well.

Our investment in PointFive represents our excitement and our confidence in their ability to transform cloud operations management. We’re honored to be partnering on this journey with Alon, Gal, and Amir alongside our friends at Index Ventures, Entree Capital, Sheva VC, and Vesey Ventures.

Welcome to the Salesforce Ventures family, PointFive!