Enterprise grade FinOps platform Finout has been chosen as "Globes" most promising Israeli startup for 2025. This is the 19th year that "Globes" has ranked the 10 most promising startups in the country, this year chosen by 80 Israel and foreign investment funds, which are active in local tech investments.
Like many success stories, Finout, headed by founders Roi Ravhon, Asaf Liveanu and Yizar Gilboa, began as a side project at another company. The three, all IDF 8200 Unit graduates, came together at startup company Logz.iO, (which had ranked in the "Globes" list of the most promising startups for 2019). Ravhon joined Logz.iO as a development operations (DevOps) engineer, eventually rising to become director of core engineering.
"When the Covid pandemic broke out, we saw an increase in the use of our system as companies switched to working from home, all at once," he says. "But then questions came up: When a company's operations move from the office to the cloud, people like me are suddenly required to answer complex questions that, on the face of it, seem trivial: How much does it cost? Why are we spending so much money on it? What is the marginal cost for each customer and how much does it cost us to process their data in our systems."
"All of this isn’t fully reflected in the company’s spending on Amazon AWS cloud servers, as parts of the system are also hosted by other providers like Microsoft and Akamai. We wanted to make every software developer at the company feel responsible and care about cloud costs, but to do that we had to create a culture of taking responsibility and create an information layer for them that, in fact, didn't exist."
At that time, Logz.io was having difficulty finding answers to all these questions. Even when information was obtained, there was no basis for comparison: "Is an invoice from Amazon that goes up 5% per month a good thing or bad thing? As a company grows, should the increase in cloud costs be exponential or marginal?" asks Ravhon. "We pieced all this data together and it broke in our hands – it became too complex."
Not only did the task become impossible, Ravhon and his DevOps team realized that this problem was also coming up at other companies where friends from 8200 worked. "We saw that everyone was stuck," he says. After a period of incubation within Logz.io, which included extensive testing and customer outreach, the three understood they had a hot property in hand. "We announced our departure, but we did it gradually," says Ravhon. "We didn't burn any bridges. To this day, we are on good terms with the Logz.io founders – they hold shares in our company."
Finout was founded in 2021, at the peak of the Covid-19 high-tech investment bubble, when companies prioritized growth above all else, raising hundreds of millions of dollars and rapidly – even heedlessly – hiring employees, with the goal of expanding during the extended work-from-home periods between lockdowns. But with the rise in US interest rates in March 2022, the entire tech industry entered a more cautious phase, one in which every expense must be scrutinized, and profitability has become more important than anything else.
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It was precisely during this period that Finout entered the market with a platform designed to help enterprises monitor their cloud and computing service usage and also giving development and finance managers the ability to shut things down when necessary. "In the past, it was relatively easy for managers to oversee computing infrastructure, which was usually confined to a single server room. But the cloud revolution changed everything," says Ravhon. "Once companies connected to Amazon's cloud, transparency vanished. Any developer could use as many resources as they wanted, and no one had visibility into it in real time – only later, when the monthly bill arrived.
"What's more, cloud usage today has become even more complex. Different departments, with different responsibilities, use cloud services in different ways-often across multiple cloud environments simultaneously. That makes it nearly impossible, for example, to predict in advance how many resources a specific manager will need, or to create an accurate usage plan – something that’s crucial for companies trying to operate in an orderly fashion."
Israeli startups with solutions to other companies' problems have an advantage: the abundance of Israeli companies that not only embrace their products, but also provide real-time, feedback, which can be straightforward and blunt when something doesn't work. "We grew up with our Israeli customers," says Ravhon. Wiz, which was recently sold to Google for $32 billion, was one of Finout 's first and most enthusiastic customers, as were other Israeli companies such as Orca Security, Armis, AppsFlyer, Forter, Riskified, and Hunters. "People used to look down on Israeli companies and their organizational culture, but there's no reason for that today. They conduct themselves responsibly and with sufficient transparency to other companies, so they can learn and improve."
Wiz adopted Finout just when it hired a manager whose sole responsibility was overseeing the company's cloud and development financial operations. The role of FinOps is now considered standard at all major technology companies. "We were Wiz's first FinOps product," reveals Ravhon. "They realized very quickly that their cloud costs were very significant and that they needed to learn how to control them at an early stage. Together with them, we went through a journey, what to research to understand proper financial management of cloud resources, how to calculate cloud costs for an individual customer, how to price transactions and how to maintain profitability. Wiz managed all of this from a special transactions room overseen by the FinOps manager, and they grew this in the right way.
"You might think that working with another Israeli company will make things easy, but selling to a company like Wiz means you have to go through tough procurement processes. This isn’t like going to two army buddies and asking them to buy your stuff. It’s about selling value with significant capabilities. Israeli companies don’t care if you’re also Israeli. They may even demand a discount on price because of it. But they will give you feedback that is invaluable. Until you’ve built up trust with an American client, the Israeli will have already given you everything you need. That way, when we entered the US market, we arrived prepared, and today we are being adopted by the world’s biggest companies."
Finout was a pioneer in the cloud costs management industry. When it entered the US, having gained fame in Israel, it quickly became a go-to shelf product for those companies that have adopted it. "Revenues just went up and up," says Ravhon. "We closed the first quarter in the US with top clients like "The New York Times" and finance and consulting corporation Marsh McLennan. Since then, we have continued at the same rate of growth and even increased it. We’ve saw how everything coalesced after a certain point, and the amount of demand there was for the product."
Today, Finout serves dozens of large-scale client companies, including some of the world's largest technology and entertainment companies, whose names Ravhon declines to mention, plus a few more names that have been announced, including giant companies like ride-sharing platform Lyft, cybersecurity company Tenable Holdings, Choice Hotels, owners of the Radisson Hotel chain; streaming service Sirius XM; and software as a service (SaaS) provider PandaDoc. The annual revenue is already estimated at a high of several tens of millions of dollars, with more than 75% of the company's current customer base located in the US and Canada.
Finout competes with existing products from established companies like IBM and Broadcom. These are usually tied to these companies' cloud networks but are struggling to catch up in the current computing era where the average company has dozens of data sources and storage-not just clouds hosted by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, but also medium and long-term data storage, such as data containers, data warehouses, and data lakes, as well as dozens of enterprise applications like Datadog and Snowflake. Rising usage of AI by enterprises has led to increased demand for monitoring activity of various language models such as OpenAI, Claude or Cursor AI. "In AI, as with the early days of cloud, employees are curious. They want to know, who ran the prompt? Who ran a query? And who inside the organization trained the model? If this information used to be opaque, today it can be transparent to everyone," says Ravhon.
In recent years, Finout has enabled these data sources to be connected to the enterprise system to help plan usage and avoid unnecessary costs. However, it is already facing new competition from a range of startups, including many Israelis, who have understood firsthand the need and size of the market – including companies like Zesty and PointFive, which have also been ranked by investors in this year's "Globes" list of 30 outstanding companies. However, Finout, as a market pioneer, heads the list as a prominent brand in FinOps management sector.
"This is already a solid community, it's a new profession with meteoric growth," explains Ravhon. FinOps managers come from finance positions and sometimes work under the company's CFO, but are usually cloud or data analysis experts. "It's usually no longer just a position whose goal is to save money for the organization. It’s looking at cloud computing as a resource whose consumption can be planned and the return it generates can be measured," explains Ravhon. "When we raised our seed round, we had to convince investors that there was such a thing as 'FinOps.' Today, it's a community that meets once a year in San Diego at a big conference. We love going there, we invest in these people and we believe in karma."
But Finout’s advantage is not the rise of FinOps, but the fact that more and more employees within enterprises are being exposed to the system and using it for their needs. At the "New York Times," for example, there are no fewer than 500 different development groups, with each developer able to access information about their cloud usage, how many resources have been allocated to them, and how much remains. Accordingly, every manager has access to data about their department.
Eyal Niv, a partner at Pitango, knew about Ravhon and his team when they worked at Logz.iO. Niv sat on the Logz.io board of directors where Logz.io CEO Tomer Levy told Niv about a mysterious team that sat in the office until late at night, trying to solve a problem that no one before had yet solved. "We identified the need at other of our portfolio companies; they needed to manage the explosion in their cloud and technology costs, but there were no systems that could help them not only save costs, but also manage their day-to-day activities," Niv tells "Globes." "I saw in Ravhon and his team, people with a spark in their eyes and a passion to solve one of the biggest problems for companies growing in the current era: the two T's – Team and Theme. They were attempting to solve a problem that previously required dozens of people on long-term projects. I saw cloud and compute costs rising and I thought it was all going to burst. And then, before my eyes, I saw the next generation ERP, enterprise resource planning software."
Finout and its associates believe it has great potential to become not only a company that enables monitoring and planning of cloud costs, but a central point from which all technological services are managed, similar to the way software giants like Oracle and SAP grew, as companies that provided other companies with resource management software. "Finout is becoming the heart of the enterprise of the future, for companies that primarily work from the cloud and consume applications remotely, and there is no limit to its expansion capabilities as a next-generation ERP," says Niv. Like Wiz, whose growth and strength are due to its ability to secure all applications running in the cloud from one place, or Cyera or EON, which map all organizational data, Finout is another company whose growth rests on a system that allows all organizational resources to be managed from one place.
"monday.com also started by managing tasks for very specific roles within the enterprise and expanded into a kind of operating system for all roles in the company. With the knowledge we have for managing resources, purchasing, licenses, automation, partners, and users, Finout is not just a platform for FinOps people. It is an information system on top of which applications can be built for every part of the organization. This is not a software company. This is the first application for an entire information system."
- Founders: Roi Ravhon, Asaf Liveanu, Yizar Gilboa
- Capital raised: $85 million, most recently at an estimated $200-300 million valuation.
- Year founded: 2021
- Notable investors: Insight Partners, Pitango First, Team8, Red Dot Capital
- Location: Sky Tower, HaMasger Street, Tel Aviv, New York
- Employees: 90
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on April 24, 2025.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2025.
