Former Tableau CFO Damon Fletcher is coming out of retirement to launch a startup that helps tech companies get a hold of their cloud costs amid a surge in spending driven by artificial intelligence.
Millworks Analytics is a cost analysis platform that helps businesses better understand and manage their cloud expenses. The Seattle-based startup emerged from stealth mode Tuesday alongside the launch of its flagship product Caliper.
Fletcher spent more than seven years at Tableau in various financial leadership roles, eventually becoming the data visualization giant’s CFO in 2018. Before that, he held managerial roles at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and was most recently CFO at DataRobot.
Fletcher recruited former Tableau colleague Michael Arvold to be the company’s co-founder and CTO. Arvold was a former senior director at Tableau who worked in the office of the CTO. He also held software engineering roles at Microsoft and Donnelley Financial Solutions.
Fletcher pointed to two opposing forces driving demand for the product: elevated interest rates are pushing companies to reduce costs, while advancements in artificial intelligence are causing a bump in cloud spend. He said he recently spoke with an executive who saw their company’s cloud costs go from $5,000 to $50,000 because it implemented AI models in production.
Fletcher said he was inspired to launch Millworks earlier this year after seeing the layoffs at Tableau and the broader tech industry, where he had a hand in workforce reductions at DataRobot last year. The goal with the startup is to create value for these workers and investors, while providing tools that help companies reduce costs and create a culture of fiscal responsibility to avoid future layoffs.
Millworks helps finance leaders pinpoint areas to cut costs. The platform currently works with Amazon Web Services, with plans to integrate with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Snowflake and Datadog.
Fletcher said the startup will soon roll out generative AI features. This includes a tagging tool for automatically labeling budget items, a forecasting option to determine cloud spending optimization, and a gamification component designed to foster a culture of fiscal responsibility, including leaderboards, personal accountability trails, and action impact scores.
“People are going to have to be more nimble and manage their costs differently than they did two or three years ago,” Fletcher said, adding that it’s also difficult for companies to raise cash from investors at the moment.
A market study by Gartner found that worldwide cloud spend is expected to grow more than 21% in 2023 to $597 billion, reaching a total of $724 billion in 2024. Cloud costs represent the second largest expense for most tech companies, trailing only employee salaries, Fletcher said.
Several cloud cost measurement companies exist on the market, such as CloudHealth, which VMWare acquired in 2018, and Cloudability, which Apptio acquired in 2019. There are startups like Seattle-based MontyCloud, Reserved.AI, and CoreStack, as well as Boston-based CloudZero, which recently raised $32 million.
Millworks, which has been bootstrapped to this point, has five employees.
