Exotanium Secures $12 Million in Series A Funding

Exotanium, a Rev Alumni Stardom Member and Ithaca-based startup offering a cloud resource optimization and management platform, announced in November that it secured $12 million in a Series A funding round led by Cambium Capital and Celesta Capital.  

Developed at Cornell University, the company’s technology leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable organizations that rely heavily on cloud computing to reduce their spending in the cloud by up to 90%, while also enhancing operational security and performance.  

These organizations can spend up to tens of millions of dollars each month renting space on computers owned by cloud service providers. Exotanium’s technology saves customers money by allowing them to run applications in the cloud spot market where applications can be migrated automatically from one available computer to the next without disruption of service and at a fraction of the cost. 

“Our platform offers a finer level of control over cloud computing resources, helping global enterprises enhance operational security, elevate performance, and drive significant cost savings,” said Exotanium co-founder and CEO and Cornell professor Hakim Weatherspoon, in a recent press release issued by the startup. “Many companies spend up to half of their revenue on cloud services and there is significant waste in most systems – our unprecedented technology is changing this.” 

Weatherspoon, who is also the associate director for the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture and a professor in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, joined Rev: Ithaca Startup Works in 2018 with Exotanium co-founders and fellow Cornell researchers, Zhiming Shen, CTO, Ph.D. ‘17 and Robbert van Renesse, chief scientist.  

“We thought it might be interesting to launch a company, so we turned to Rev for guidance. Our mentors there suggested that we participate in NSF I-Corps. We completed both regional and national I-Corps programming,” said Weatherspoon. “Through the regional course, we were able to initially investigate the potential customer for our technology – as a researcher, you think you know who the potential customer is, but you’re often wrong – and then in I-Corps Teams, we interviewed over 100 additional potential customers and were connected to an industry-based mentor. That was critical, because it helped us to pivot and focus our solution on a particular direction.”  

Weatherspoon encourages entrepreneurs in the Cornell entrepreneurship ecosystem to take advantage of Rev: Ithaca Startup Works and other entrepreneurship resources led by the university such as IN I-Corps, Center for Technology Licensing, Praxis Center for Venture Development, and Cornell Tech’s Runway Startups Program. 

“Cornell is great, because it provides the tools to explore whether A) your idea is worth it, meaning there is a potential market interest; and B) whether you’re interested in it or not, because it requires a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to bring an idea to a scalable level,” said Weatherspoon.  

With a growing portfolio of customers such as the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, Argonne, and Idaho National Laboratory, Exotanium continues to garner investor support. To date, the startup has generated $19 million in funding, including grants from the United States Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. 

Exotanium plans to use the Series A funding to support its future product roadmap, including the expansion to new platforms and hyperscalers, as well as the development of a self-service marketplace. The funding will also be allocated toward marketing and recruitment efforts to expand brand awareness and grow the company’s engineering team.  

Learn more about Exotanium and its latest funding milestone.