After a year that saw more than 300% growth in a customer base that includes the world’s largest enterprises and MSPs, Ternary, a multicloud spend management platform, has announced the closure of a $12 million úSeries A financing round to expand its FinOps-native platform, which enables finance, engineering, and cloud operations at scale.
Ternary 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 funding, which brings Ternary’s total raised to about $20 million, will be expended toward Ternary’s go-to-market efforts, scaling its revenue team and making continued investments in product development.
Using Ternary, seasoned FinOps practitioners and finance teams can collaborate with engineers, creating advanced models that guide the efficient placement of resources across products, clouds, and business units.
“Spending in AWS, Azure, and GCP continues to be a large and growing expense category for a majority of enterprises,” said Ternary CEO Sasha Kipervarg. “Finance, engineering, and FinOps teams operating at scale lack single-pane, multicloud instrumentation to view, attribute, budget, and understand the cost efficiency of their spend. Innovation in the FinOps space has slowed, and legacy incumbents have failed to deliver the new capabilities required by modern finance and engineering teams, leaving leaders flying blind in the cloud.”
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 3 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.
Ternary also recommends areas for cost reduction, employing “human-tunable” algorithms 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.
Philips Babatunde