We’re excited to announce our lead investment in Cloud Capital's pre-seed round. This team moves fast, so when combined with their seed round alongside fellow believers (BACKED VC and MiddleGame Ventures), this week the company announced a combined $7.7M in seed funding.

Cloud Capital is pioneering a FinTech platform designed to give CFOs and finance leaders the visibility and tools they need to manage and optimize cloud infrastructure costs.

In Edward Barrow, Spencer Pingry and Zack Liscio, we’re backing repeat product founders with an earned insight about what’s broken in managing cloud spend at scale. They’re obsessed about the user and the problem, they have a powerful wedge product, combined with huge vision and ambition for what they’re building in the long term.

The Opportunity

Cloud infrastructure is now a $344 billion market. And yet, for most companies, cloud spend is still a black box—one of the fastest growing line items that’s second only to headcount, but one that’s owned by engineering rather than finance.

That’s a problem.

CTOs aren’t forecasters. CFOs can’t see the roadmap. There’s no common language, no shared tooling, and no way to bridge the gap between technical usage and financial planning.

The result? Frustration, inefficient spend and unseen risk.

The complexity of cloud billing, combined with the lack of intuitive tools, has left finance leaders struggling to forecast spend, identify savings opportunities, and avoid rigid long-term commitments that may not align with their company’s evolving needs.

The team at Cloud Capital felt this pain firsthand while negotiating a cloud migration at Optimizely. They realized this wasn’t just an Optimizely problem—it was systemic, and it was ripe for change.

Cloud Capital addresses this gap by offering a platform that brings transparency and control, enabling CFOs to make informed decisions and manage their cloud spend in the same way they would expect with other significant investments.

The Team

Cloud Capital’s founding team— Edward Barrow (CEO), Spencer Pingry (CTO), and Zack Liscio (CPO) - have the scars and earned insights from their time at Optimizely, where they wrestled this exact challenge across product, platform, and procurement.

Each of them has been a founder previously and couldn’t un-see this problem once they’d experienced it. They knew they wanted to work together to help other companies avoid the same pain and frustration.

Ed - previously founder CEO at Idio, which was acquired by Optimizely, where he then led product and corporate strategy.
Spencer - previously founder CTO at Zaius, which was acquired by Optimizely, where he became VP of Software Architecture. Spencer’s superpower is building scalable and efficient systems.
Zack - previously founder CEO of Naytev (YC alum), more recently VP Product at Optimizely where he was responsible for stitching together a fragmented stack into one coherent strategy.

They’ve worked together before, felt the problem directly, and know exactly what good looks like. That’s a rare combination—and it shows in the clarity of their thinking, their speed of execution, and the scale of their ambition.

Their combined experience and firsthand insights into the pain points of cloud spending make them uniquely positioned to tackle this problem.

The Product

Cloud Capital is rethinking how companies forecast and buy cloud infrastructure:

1️⃣ Collaborative forecasting – helping finance and engineering teams work together to create accurate, driver-based forecasts for cloud spend. By combining financial projections, product roadmaps, and historic usage data, the platform provides CFOs with visibility into future cloud commitments—enabling them to plan, allocate, and manage budgets with confidence.

2️⃣ Savings and Risk Management - a financial infrastructure layer that allows companies to safely commit to cloud capacity and capture savings—without taking on unnecessary risk. The platform manages the complexity of cloud commitments (like reserved instances and spend-based discounts), allowing companies to benefit from long-term pricing advantages, while retaining the flexibility they need to grow. It’s a system that brings the discipline of financial planning to cloud procurement, and helps CFOs unlock guaranteed savings with none of the spreadsheet guesswork.

3️⃣ Free-to-use forecasting, monetised via savings delivered – forecasting tools are available at no cost, making it easy for finance teams to get started. As companies begin to plan with more precision and unlock efficiencies, Cloud Capital monetizes through the financial outcomes it helps deliver—linking its success directly to that of its customers.

🎯 This combination of wedge + workflow + wallet is rare. The product becomes embedded into financial planning and payments infrastructure, creating real lock-in—and as it scales, the data network effect enhances forecast accuracy and savings for all of its users.

The Future

As cloud infrastructure continues to be a significant and growing expense for technology companies, compounded by AI, the need for transparency, control, and cost optimization becomes increasingly critical.

Cloud Capital is at the forefront of this transformation, offering a solution that empowers CFOs to take charge of their cloud spend, make informed decisions, and drive financial efficiency.

They’re building the financial control layer for cloud infrastructure, optimised for both buyers and sellers. As the market matures, we believe a financial intermediary will emerge to serve both sides—offering better visibility, lower costs, and more flexible terms to buyers; while delivering larger commitments, faster sales cycles and increased insight to the cloud providers themselves.

Cloud Capital is that intermediary.

We’re excited to support Ed, Spencer, and Zack as they unlock the next chapter of cloud infrastructure—one forecast at a time.

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