

Why We Invested In North: Cloud Spending is in the CFO’s Bullseye
Why did we invest in North and cloud infrastructure veteran Matt Biringer?
We’re entering a new era in how companies operate and spend. Over the last two decades, software businesses have transitioned from on-prem to cloud, from desktop to mobile, and from licensed software to SaaS. We’re seeing another foundational shift in startup and corporate growth planning: the move from scaling teams to scaling compute due to the shift in new budget allocation from talent to AI.
In AI-driven companies and increasingly in traditional software businesses, the marginal cost of delivering value is no longer a salary; it’s a token, a model call, or a GPU hour. This trend is not confined to research labs or model vendors. It’s already visible across the income statements of growth-stage startups, and we believe it will only accelerate from here.
Rising Cloud Costs Threaten Gross Margins More than Payroll
The rise of generative AI, inference agents, and LLM-enabled workflows is pushing cloud infrastructure to the center of the business model.
Many AI teams are already reporting that cloud spending has become their most significant operational cost, surpassing even headcount. And it’s not just AI-native businesses. SaaS companies integrating AI into their products are now facing a sharp increase in their AWS, GCP, and Azure bills and are being forced to confront cloud spending as a first-order concern.
This is happening at the same time public cloud adoption continues to grow rapidly. Goldman Sachs estimates that Cloud computing sales are expected to grow by 22% annually to $2 trillion by 2030, with generative artificial intelligence forecast to account for about 10-15% of the spending.
The consequence is clear: businesses are becoming more reliant on cloud infrastructure, but few have the systems in place to manage this spend with the same rigor they apply to finance, hiring, or go-to-market execution.
SaaS & Headcount Spending is Predictable, AI Apps & Cloud Costs are Not
With the possible exception of sales commission payouts, headcount costs are one of the simplest expenses for a company to model. Salary benchmarks, benefits costs, and hiring forecasts easily roll up into a budget plan that everyone can understand… and control. If you’re ahead or behind the plan, a CEO can accelerate or delay new hires.
In a world where consumption-based pricing models are replacing legacy SaaS pricing and development teams are increasingly leveraging LLMs in their products, the visibility and predictability of vendor software expenses and core product COGs become murky and ripe for end-of-month surprises for CEOs and CFOs.
We’re increasingly discussing software expenses and cloud COGS in board meetings, and I expect the focus on software, LLM, and cloud costs to be a significant factor in startup growth efficiency. Margins will take center stage in budget and planning meetings in startups and Fortune 500 companies alike.
Why North Matters Now
North is building an intelligent AI-powered financial system for the cloud. Their platform automates rate optimization, commitment management, cost center visibility, and anomaly detection. It does this not through dashboards or manual workflows, but through AI models and automation that require no in-house FinOps or engineering support.
In a world where engineering time is scarce and cloud computing spending is rising fast, North helps customers act, not just observe. Their software delivers savings of 40 to 50 percent for customers who spend millions of dollars with cloud providers, while also giving real-time visibility into KPIs that tie cloud spending to product usage and business performance.
What makes North different is not just how much it saves but also how little effort it requires. Setup takes minutes, and results are near-instant. Their platform has managed over $170 million in cloud spending with 100 percent customer retention and 99.99 percent savings utilization… and they’re just getting started.
This is not a niche use case. This is the future of cloud financial operations.
How North Fits Into Our Strategy
At Companyon Ventures, we back B2B software and applied AI startups that have reached product-market fit and are now scaling fast. North was scaling so quickly that they added $1M of ARR during our few weeks of due diligence.
We believe the most successful enduring companies of the next decade will run leaner teams and larger clusters. They will rely more on models and automation than on headcount. But with that shift comes complexity, and complexity demands intelligence. Tools like North are not just helping manage cloud spend. They are becoming core to how modern software companies scale efficiently.
As more founders wrestle with rising cloud bills and as AI adoption continues to surge, we expect platforms like North to become standard infrastructure, just like CRMs, ERPs, or finance systems before them.
We are proud to support the North team and their mission to bring clarity, control, and automation to one of the most important challenges facing modern software companies.
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