ScaleOps raises $130M to tackle computing efficiency crisis as AI infrastructure costs soar

ScaleOps raises $130M to improve computing efficiency amid AI demand | TechCrunch

AI may be booming, but behind the scenes, companies are wasting vast amounts of expensive compute. GPUs sit idle, workloads are over-provisioned, and cloud costs continue to climb. ScaleOps believes the problem isn't a shortage -- it's mismanagement. The startup, which builds software that automatically manages and reallocates computing resources in real-time, has raised $130 million at an $800 million valuation, ScaleOps said Monday. The Series C funding round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, NFX, Glilot Capital Partners, and Picture Capital. The company says its software reduces cloud and AI infrastructure costs by as much as 80%. ScaleOps was co-founded in 2022 by Yodar Shafrir, a former engineer at Run:ai, a GPU orchestration startup acquired by Nvidia, after seeing firsthand how difficult it was for companies to manage increasingly complex AI workloads. While tools like Kubernetes help run applications across large clusters of machines, they often rely on static configurations that struggle to keep up with fast-changing demand, leading to underused GPUs, performance issues, and costly inefficiencies. "As part of my role [at Run:ai], I met many customers, especially DevOps teams," Shafrir, who is the company's CEO, told TechCrunch. "While they really liked what Run:ai provided, they still struggled to manage their production workloads, especially as inference workloads became more common in the AI era. When I zoomed out, I realized the problem wasn't just GPUs. It extended to compute, memory, storage, and networking. The same patterns kept repeating; teams were failing to manage resources efficiently." DevOps teams often found themselves chasing down multiple stakeholders to resolve issues, and too often, those efforts fell short. Most existing tools offered visibility into problems, but stopped short of delivering actual solutions. That gap revealed a significant market opportunity. ScaleOps connects application needs with infrastructure decisions in real time and provides a fully autonomous solution that manages infrastructure end-to-end, Shafrir said. "Kubernetes is a great system. It's flexible and highly configurable. But that's also the problem," Shafrir said. "Kubernetes relies heavily on static configurations. Applications today are highly dynamic, which requires constant manual work across teams. You need something that understands the context of each application -- what it needs, how it behaves, and how the environment is changing." There are several players in this space, including Cast AI, Kubecost and Spot. While many companies have introduced automation tools, they often operate without full context, which can lead to performance issues and even downtime, limiting trust among teams running production environments, according to the CEO. The startup says its platform was built specifically for production from the ground up. It is fully autonomous, context-aware, and works out of the box without requiring manual configuration -- capabilities the company believes differentiate ScaleOps from competitors. The New York-headquartered company serves enterprise customers globally, particularly those operating Kubernetes-based infrastructure, with a footprint that spans large organizations as well as companies across Europe and India. ScaleOps says its platform is used by a range of enterprise clients, including Adobe, Wiz, DocuSign, Salesforce and Coupa. The Series C funding comes roughly a year and a half after ScaleOps raised $58 million in its Series B round in November 2024. Since then, the team has seen strong demand for autonomous solutions to manage cloud infrastructure, Shafrir said, adding that it is still in the early stages of its growth. The company's total funding is about $210 million, according to a spokesperson. ScaleOps said it has seen more than 450% year-over-year growth and that it has tripled its headcount over the past 12 months, with plans to more than triple it again by year-end. With the new capital, ScaleOps plans to roll out new products and expand its platform. As AI drives demand for compute, managing that infrastructure is becoming increasingly critical. The startup said it will continue building toward fully autonomous infrastructure.

ScaleOps raises $130M at an $800M+ valuation

The New York and Israel-based startup, founded by a former Run:ai engineer and professional triathlete, has grown 350%+ year-on-year and counts Adobe, Wiz, DocuSign, and Salesforce among its customers. Insight Partners led the Series C. ScaleOps has raised $130 million in a Series C round at a valuation of more than $800 million, led by Insight Partners with participation from all existing investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, NFX, Glilot Capital Partners, and Picture Capital. The round brings total funding to $210 million, and includes a secondary transaction worth tens of millions of dollars that allows employees to realise some of their equity. The company has grown more than 350% year-on-year and counts Adobe, Wiz, DocuSign, Salesforce, and Coupa among its enterprise customers. ScaleOps makes software that does something deceptively difficult: it manages Kubernetes infrastructure autonomously in real time. Kubernetes is the container orchestration system that runs the vast majority of modern cloud applications, and it is excellent at what it was designed for. The problem is that it was designed for a world of relatively stable workloads. Today, with AI models being invoked constantly, traffic patterns shifting by the second, and GPU demand spiking unpredictably, the static resource configurations that Kubernetes relies on fall apart. Engineering teams end up doing constant manual tuning to avoid either performance failures or ballooning costs, a task that is simply not tractable when managing hundreds or thousands of workloads simultaneously. ScaleOps replaces that manual work with continuous, context-aware automation, adjusting compute and GPU resources in real time without human intervention. Yodar Shafrir, the company's CEO and co-founder, came to the problem with an unusual background. Before founding ScaleOps in 2022, he was an engineer at Run:ai, the GPU orchestration startup that Nvidia acquired. He also spent 15 years as a professional triathlete competing internationally for Israel, winning national championships, a background that perhaps explains the methodical approach to a problem most of his competitors were ignoring. The company was founded in the months before the AI infrastructure buildout that would make the problem impossible to ignore. Now, with AI compute demand growing at triple-digit rates year-on-year and most enterprises still using pre-AI infrastructure management tools, the timing has aligned with ScaleOps' bet. The platform covers Kubernetes pod rightsizing, replica optimisation, node management, spot instance optimisation, and, increasingly, GPU and AI model resource management. It is available on AWS Marketplace, Azure Marketplace, and Google Cloud Marketplace, and is FIPS-compatible for FedRAMP-regulated environments. The company has more than 120 employees across Israel, North America, and Europe, having tripled its team in the past 12 months; it expects to triple again by year-end. Competitors in the space include Cast AI, Kubecost, and Spot, though Shafrir argues that most automation tools still operate without full application context, a limitation that causes performance issues in production and limits enterprise trust.

Israeli AI optimization company ScaleOps surpasses $800 million valuation

After working with Adobe, Wiz, and other Fortune 500 companies, ScaleOps announced a $130 million Series C investment round, bringing its total funding to $210 million. ScaleOps, a leading Israeli artificial intelligence company, raised $130 million in its Series C investment round, bringing the company's valuation over the $800 million mark and positioning it among the world's most valued companies in the autonomous cloud and AI infrastructure sector. The company announced the investment on Monday, with the round led by global software investor Insight Partners and the participation from all existing investors, Lightspeed Venture Partners, NFX, Glilot Capital Partners, and Picture Capital. With this, ScaleOps, which specializes in autonomously and continuously managing and scaling cloud and AI infrastructure in real time, brought its total funding to $210 million, the company said. "Compute is the defining bottleneck of the AI era, and the way most enterprises manage compute was built for a world that no longer exists," said Yodar Shafrir, CEO and founder at ScaleOps. "We built ScaleOps to change that, creating a new category of autonomous infrastructure management so that AI and cloud applications can run at full potential. This funding accelerates our mission to make infrastructure that manages itself the new enterprise standard," he added. Operating at the core of tech world giants According to their official statement, in 2026, the demand for cloud and AI infrastructure had grown three times year over year, while most companies still use "pre-AI maintenance." "ScaleOps is addressing the urgent challenge of managing cloud and AI workloads, helping enterprises unlock performance, efficiency, and innovation at scale," Jeff Horing, Managing Director at Insight Partners, explained. The Autonomous Cloud and AI Infrastructure Management service that ScaleOps offers is centered around a "continuous, real-time management of cloud-native environments across GPUs and computers." "The platform continuously optimizes compute across CPU, memory, and GPUs without human intervention, enabling enterprises to scale AI and core applications on infrastructure that manages itself," the company explained. Currently, the company has giants of the tech world, such as Adobe, Wiz, DocuSign, and Coupa, among other Fortune 500 companies, as its clients. With a 350% year-over-year growth, the company also managed to triple the size of its team and the demand for its services.