Optimyze Cloud

Optimyze.cloud AG, established in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2019, was a specialized firm focused on enhancing cloud efficiency for enterprises. The company was founded by Thomas Dullien, also known as Halvar Flake, and Sean Heelan. Dullien brought a wealth of experience from his previous venture, zynamics, a security research company acquired by Google in 2011. Following the acquisition, he spent eight years as a staff engineer at Google, including time with the Project Zero security research team, before co-founding Optimyze. This background in reverse engineering and system efficiency deeply informed the company's direction.

The firm developed a platform designed to help businesses track and reduce their cloud computing expenditures by identifying inefficiencies in CPU, storage, and network utilization. Optimyze's core offering was a continuous profiling tool named Prodfiler, which utilized eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) technology. This allowed for whole-system, always-on profiling with minimal performance overhead, giving engineers detailed visibility into how much processor and memory resources each line of code consumed. Unlike traditional methods that could be resource-intensive, Optimyze’s solution could pinpoint the exact sources of wasted cycles, enabling targeted code optimization and significant cost savings.

The company's business model centered on providing this granular insight as a service to companies with substantial cloud infrastructure costs. In May 2020, Optimyze secured $3 million in a seed funding round led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a notable investment as it was a16z's first in a European seed-stage company. After launching Prodfiler in August 2021, the company quickly demonstrated its value in the growing observability market. This success led to its acquisition by Elastic N.V. on October 17, 2021. Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, acquired Optimyze to integrate its continuous profiling capabilities into the Elastic Observability platform, aiming to unify metrics, logs, and traces with profiling data to provide a comprehensive view of application performance.

Keywords: cloud cost optimization, continuous profiling, eBPF, cloud efficiency, performance monitoring, Prodfiler, Thomas Dullien, Sean Heelan, zynamics, Elastic acquisition, a16z, Andreessen Horowitz, resource utilization, CPU profiling, memory profiling, code optimization, observability, FinOps, cloud spend management, infrastructure monitoring, application performance management, whole-system profiling