Sync Computing rakes in $15.5M to automatically optimize cloud resources

techcrunch.com:

After a pandemic-driven cloud adoption boom in the enterprise, costs are finally coming under a microscope. More than a third of businesses report having cloud budget overruns of up to 40%, according to a recent poll by observability software vendor Pepperdata. A separate survey from Flexera found that optimizing the existing use of cloud services is a top initiative at 59% of companies — cost being the main motivation. 

An entire cottage industry of startups has sprung up around optimizing cloud compute. But one in the race, Sync Computing, claims to uniquely tie business objectives like cost and runtime reduction directly to low-level infrastructure configurations. Founded as a spinout from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, Sync today landed $12 million in a venture funding round (plus $3.5 million in debt) led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from The Engine, Moore Strategic Ventures and National Grid Partners.

Sync co-founders Jeff Chou and Suraj Bramhavar both worked as members of the technical staff at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory prior to launching the startup. Bramhavar came to MIT by way of a photonics research position at Intel, while Chou co-founded another startup — Anoka Microsystems — designing a low-cost optical switch.

Sync was born out of innovations developed at the Lincoln Lab, including a method to accelerate a mathematical optimization problem commonly found in logistics applications. While many cloud cost solutions either provide recommendations for high-level optimization or support workflows that tune workloads, Sync goes deeper, Chou and Bramhavar say, with app-specific details and suggestions based on algorithms designed to “order” the appropriate resources.

“[We realized that our methods] can