Yuki raises $6 million in Seed funding to tackle runaway data costs
The startup argues enterprises lack a true control system for data in the AI era.
Yuki, a data cost optimization startup founded in 2025, has emerged from stealth with a $6 million Seed round as companies grapple with how to control data and AI workloads that were never designed to be governed in real time.
The funding round was led by Hyperwise Ventures, with participation from VelocitX, Tal Ventures, Fresh.fund, and Yakir Daniel, the founder of Spot.io, the cloud cost optimization company acquired by NetApp and now part of Flexera.
For many organizations, the default response to rising data usage has been blunt and costly: buying more of the same compute resources, regardless of whether workloads differ in urgency, performance requirements, or business value. As data volumes balloon and AI-driven experimentation becomes routine, that approach has created layers of inefficiency that compound over time.
Yuki’s founders argue the core issue is not infrastructure, but the absence of a control system for data itself. “Data is the only resource in an organization that no one truly manages,” said Ido Arieli Noga, Yuki’s co-founder and CEO. Budgets, cloud resources, and teams are tightly governed, he said, but the data flowing through them is not, even as it becomes one of the largest cost drivers on the balance sheet.
At the center of Yuki’s platform is what it calls Yuki Fabric, an AI-based control and automation layer that sits above existing data infrastructure. The system integrates with platforms such as Snowflake and Google’s BigQuery, and supports Iceberg-based data lakes, which are increasingly used by enterprises seeking to separate storage from compute.
Rather than optimizing a single database or warehouse, Yuki aims to act as a unifying control plane across an organization’s data environment. Its model continuously learns how workloads behave, how they relate to service-level agreements, and how cost and performance trade off against each other. Based on that information, it makes execution decisions in real time, routing queries to the most efficient available compute resources and enforcing priorities between business-critical workloads and lower-value internal processes.
According to the company, customers using Yuki’s platform in 2025 have reduced their data costs by an average of 42.6 percent, savings that can amount to millions of dollars for large enterprises. The startup’s early customers include cybersecurity company Tenable and media group Angel Studios.
The market Yuki is entering is crowded. Cloud management and optimization tools are estimated to represent a $9.8 billion market, with more than 200 vendors competing for enterprise budgets. But Yuki’s founders argue that most existing tools focus on infrastructure or cloud accounts, not on governing data workloads themselves, a distinction they believe will grow more important as AI-driven usage accelerates.
Yuki was founded in 2025 by Noga and Amir Peres, the company’s CTO. The two have known each other since childhood and previously collaborated on joint ventures before spending years on separate professional paths. A chance reconnection revealed they were independently confronting the same challenge: organizations drowning in data queries and compute costs without a system capable of managing them holistically.
The company currently employs 15 people, most of them based in Israel, with additional staff in the United States and the United Kingdom. The new funding will be used to expand Yuki’s Israeli research and development operation, deepen its product capabilities, add support for additional data platforms, and scale its sales efforts in the U.S.
