AI is almost everywhere! By leveraging AI, businesses can proactively optimise workloads, reduce manual tuning efforts, and ensure seamless scalability across cloud environments. Akamas, the Italian startup specialising in AI-driven cloud optimisation, has raised $10 million in its first institutional funding round led by United Ventures, one of Italy’s largest venture capital firms.
Scaling with enterprise demand
The investment comes as Akamas gains momentum with enterprise customers, including signing its first seven-figure contract. With a growing footprint in North America, the company will establish its first US office in Boston and expand its engineering, sales, and marketing teams across Italy and the US. Over the next year, Akamas will grow from 10 to 35 employees, reinforcing its go-to-market strategy and accelerating the launch of new industry-leading features.
Speaking with TFN, Luca Forni, co-founder and CEO at Akamas said, “Our goal is to become the global leader in AI-driven cloud optimisation, and this investment will help us achieve that. We will use it to expand into North America. We are establishing our first U.S. office in Boston and growing our go-to-market team to support enterprise adoption in the U.S. The funds will also help us accelerate product innovation.”
He further added, “We’re launching a SaaS version of Akamas, expanding integrations with AWS, Dynatrace, Datadog, and more, and enhancing Kubernetes Insight, our new AI-powered optimisation feature. Finally, the investment round will scale our team – We are significantly growing our team from 10 to 35 employees in the next year, with a focus on engineering, sales, and marketing.”
In addition to strengthening Akamas’ leadership in full-stack optimisation for cloud and Kubernetes environments, this investment will enable Moviri Group, Akamas’ parent company, to retain a strategic minority position while transferring operational control.
What problem do the co-founders aim to solve?
Akamas was founded in 2019 as a spin-off from Movir by Luca Forni and Stefano Doni. Highlighting the market need, Luca said, “We saw firsthand how enterprises struggled to optimise their cloud and Kubernetes environments effectively. Despite the rise of automation and AI, most organisations still rely on manual tuning, trial and error, or rigid rules-based tools, leading to wasted cloud spend and suboptimal performance. The market was missing a truly intelligent solution—one that could continuously optimise applications without human intervention. That’s why we created Akamas: to bring AI-driven, application-aware optimisation to the enterprise cloud.”
Its patented technology enables organisations to achieve unmatched cost savings, reliability, and performance by optimising across the entire technology stack. Akamas serves a global customer base, with a focus on industries like retail, financial services, and telecommunications.
Regarding their aim, Luca said, “Cloud environments are inherently complex, with thousands of configuration parameters across applications, infrastructure, and Kubernetes clusters. Organisations often struggle to balance cost, performance, and reliability, leading to overspending or degraded user experience. Akamas solves this problem by automating the optimisation process using AI. Our platform continuously learns and fine-tunes configurations to ensure maximum performance at the lowest possible cost—without compromising reliability. This is a game-changer for companies relying on cloud-native architectures, where even minor inefficiencies can lead to massive cost overruns.”
What’s special about Akamas’ technology?
Akamas is unique because it takes an “application-aware” and full-stack approach to cloud optimisation. Unlike FinOps tools that focus only on cost, or Kubernetes tools that optimise only infrastructure, Akamas optimises across the entire stack, including applications, middleware, and cloud resources, simultaneously.
The key differentiators as pointed about by the co-founder include:
- AI-driven, automated optimisation: No manual tuning, no static rules—its technology continuously finds the best settings for each workload.
- Performance + cost optimisation: Other tools force companies to choose between performance and cost savings—Akamas ensures both.
- Proprietary technology with global patents: Its AI algorithms are protected by five global patents, making them unique in the market.
Luca added: “That’s why industry leaders like SabreNetflix, SISALDynatrace, and top financial and TelCo institutions trust Akamas for their cloud and Kubernetes optimisation needs.”
Among its planned innovations are Kubernetes Insight (now in beta) to simplify Kubernetes optimisation, a SaaS version of the Akamas platform, and integrations with major cloud providers and observability tools such as AWS, Google Cloud, Dynatrace, Datadog, and Grafana Labs.
User base
Akamas has built a reputation for delivering measurable results to companies whose businesses rely heavily on cloud applications. Its platform has been successfully applied across hundreds of Kubernetes clusters and thousands of cloud instances for customers spanning retail, financial services, travel, and telecommunications. Notable references include Sisal, a leading European gaming company, and Sabre, a US-based travel technology giant. Akamas has also garnered endorsements from industry leaders, including thought leaders at Netflix and Dynatrace, and earned accolades such as the Unicredit StartLab Prize and the CIO Digital360 Award.
What makes it stand out?
Akamas challenges manual, reactive cloud optimisation, offering a proactive, AI-driven solution that integrates application performance and infrastructure insights. While many competitors focus solely on cost reduction, Akamas optimises the entire cloud stack, ensuring that reliability and performance are never compromised.
A spin-off from Moviri, a leader in performance engineering, Akamas holds five global patents, reinforcing its cutting-edge approach to cloud and Kubernetes optimisation.
What are its next steps?
With $10 million in funding, Akamas is poised to redefine enterprise cloud efficiency, ensuring companies maximise performance while controlling costs. By expanding into North America, scaling its AI-powered platform, and launching new cloud-native features, Akamas is setting the stage for the next wave of cloud optimisation innovation.
“Cloud optimisation is no longer just about saving costs,” Stefano Doni, CTO and Co-founder of Akamas explained. “It’s about enabling businesses to scale efficiently, deliver exceptional user experiences, and maintain reliability. At Akamas, we are redefining the possibilities for cloud and Kubernetes environments.”
“We are proud to lead this round for Akamas, who are at the forefront of application-aware optimisation technology,” said Fabio Pirovano, Partner at United Ventures. “Akamas’ innovative approach to simplifying cloud and Kubernetes optimisation, coupled with its impressive team and vision, positions it as a game-changer in the global tech landscape. We’re excited to support their expansion into North America and their continued growth as they redefine how organisations optimise performance, reliability, and costs at scale.”
