Cincinnati's FinOpsly raises $4.45 million Seed Round to automate the "Control Plane" of AI and cloud costs
As enterprises struggle to control AI and cloud spending in real time, this Cincinnati startup's $4.45M raise signals a shift from passive dashboards to autonomous intervention—positioning the region as a hub for AI infrastructure governance.
FinOpsly, a Cincinnati-based startup tackling the financial complexity of modern cloud and AI environments, has closed a $4.45 million seed funding round led by Cultivation Capital.
Why it matters
As AI infrastructure costs consume a growing share of enterprise budgets, the gap between observability and control has become a C-suite priority. While companies can see where money went, most still struggle to stop "runaway" costs in real time.
The shift to "Agentic" FinOps
For years, the FinOps (Financial Operations) sector has been dominated by dashboard-heavy tools that require manual intervention to fix inefficiencies. In 2026, that manual approach is failing to keep pace with the market:
- The Spending Supercycle: Global IT spending is forecast to reach $6.15 trillion this year.
- The Infrastructure Surge: Server and data center spending—largely driven by generative AI—is projected to grow between 31% and 37% year-over-year.
FinOpsly's Value-Control platform uses agentic AI—autonomous systems that take action under strict guardrails—to intervene before waste spirals. Key features include:
- Real-time intervention: Unlike traditional tools that report monthly snapshots, FinOpsly's agents detect and curb runaway workloads across AWS, Azure, and Snowflake as they occur.
- Business mapping: The platform maps cloud and AI spend to specific business constructs—products, teams, or customer segments—allowing finance leaders to calculate the true ROI of tech investments.
- Explainable decisions: Built as an AI-native "system of action," the platform provides explainable logic for its automated decisions, keeping IT teams informed without burying them in alerts.
The Cincinnati connection
The seed round saw heavy participation from the Midwest venture ecosystem, including Hyde Park Venture Partners, North Coast Ventures, Cintrifuse Capital, and 71/70 Angels.
The raise adds to Cincinnati's standing as a hub for enterprise-grade SaaS. While coastal hubs often focus on consumer-facing AI, Ohio startups are increasingly concentrating on the governance and economic infrastructure needed to make these technologies sustainable for the Fortune 500.
What they're saying
“Enterprises don’t have a visibility problem — they have a control problem,” said Kiran Jain, Co-Founder of FinOpsly. “Teams can see costs, but they struggle to tie them to business value or take action before overruns occur. FinOpsly was built to change that.”
“FinOpsly is addressing one of the most urgent problems facing modern enterprises,” said Brian Matthews, Cofounder and General Partner at Cultivation Capital. “Their focus on connecting spend to business value and delivering control through an agentic, AI-native platform represents a meaningful shift from dashboards to execution.”
"Existing systems provide visibility, but they don’t tell you what you got for the spend, who owns it, or how to prevent waste," said Todd Federman, Managing Director of North Coast Ventures. "FinOpsly raises the bar by tying spend to outcomes, like cost per customer, cost per workflow, and cost per model call, then enforcing real-time controls that steer behavior before costs spiral.”
The bottom line
As AI moves from experimental pilots to core business infrastructure, the companies that control their unit economics in real time will be the ones that thrive. FinOpsly is positioning itself as the control plane for this era, using its fresh capital to accelerate product development, expand platform integrations, and scale its go-to-market efforts.
