Yuki, a data cost optimization startup, has emerged from stealth with a $6 million seed round, targeting a growing pain point for enterprises facing rising data and AI infrastructure bills. The financing was led by Hyperwise Ventures, with participation from VelocitX, Tal Ventures, Fresh.fund, and Yakir Daniel, the founder of Spot.io (which was acquired by NetApp and is now part of Flexera).
The company is positioning its platform as an automated control layer that sits above data infrastructure vendors, managing cost and performance trade-offs in real time. Yuki says many organizations still address heavier AI and analytics workloads by scaling the same rigid compute approach across teams, even when those teams have different service-level needs, budgets, and performance requirements—an approach the company argues drives large and compounding inefficiencies as data volumes expand.
At the center of the offering is Yuki Fabric, an optimization AI model that serves as a unified control and automation layer across an organization’s data stack. Yuki says it works across environments, including Snowflake and Google BigQuery, with native support for Iceberg-based data lakes. As more enterprises adopt Iceberg to separate storage from compute, Yuki is pitching its platform as the intelligence layer that governs how workloads consume those resources, aiming to reduce duplicated infrastructure and operational processes while enforcing SLAs across teams and workloads.
Yuki says its system continuously learns workload behavior and cost-performance trade-offs, then dynamically optimizes execution decisions. The company describes a deployment process intended to be fast and lightweight, without requiring customers to change code or queries. The platform prioritizes workloads in real time, separating business-critical activity from lower-priority internal tasks, and routes queries to the most efficient compute resource available at that moment.
The startup’s commercial model is tied directly to outcomes. Yuki says it charges a fee based on a percentage of realized savings and does not charge if it does not generate savings. As of 2025, Yuki says customers using its platform have saved an average of about 42.6% on data costs—savings that it says can reach millions of dollars annually for large enterprises.
Yuki says its customer base includes cybersecurity company Tenable and media company Angel Studios. The company is targeting organizations with large-scale data and AI operations that want tighter operational control, lower costs, and more predictable performance as workloads become more variable and experimentation increases.
Founded in 2025, Yuki was started by CEO Ido Arieli Noga and CTO Amir Peres. The founders say they built the company after concluding that while organizations have teams and budgets around cloud infrastructure, “data itself” lacks an effective control system. Yuki employs 15 people, primarily based in Israel, with additional team members in the U.S. and the U.K.
Yuki said it will use the new funding to expand its Israeli R&D center, deepen product capabilities, add support for more data platforms, and accelerate growth in the U.S. through sales expansion.
KEY QUOTES:
“After building Spot, it was easy for me to recognize the pain point Yuki is solving. They’re building the control layer for data cost optimization just as AI is turning data spend into a board-level issue.”
Yakir Daniel, Founder of Spot.io (Flexera)
“Data is the only resource in an organization that no one truly manages. We know how to store it, but not how to govern it. There are budgets, cloud infrastructure, and teams, but the data itself has no control system.”
“For years, the default response to growth was to burn more money on the same one-size-fits-all infrastructure. That model is fundamentally broken, and it doesn’t scale in an AI-driven world.”
“Yuki was built to become the control layer that makes data infrastructure workload-aware and governed in real time. In the age of AI, this becomes even more critical.”
Ido Arieli Noga, CEO of Yuki
