In 2023, three engineers walked out of the AWS halls in Tel Aviv and into a problem no one else was brave, or crazy, enough to fix: cloud storage waste. You know the kind. You’re running EBS volumes on AWS, watching your cloud bill light up like a pinball machine, and no matter how many dashboards you stare at, the costs never scale down. Zivan Ori, Ziv Serlin, and Yoav Ilovich didn’t just see the bloat, they lived it. These guys didn’t pivot into cloud. They built it. Ori and Serlin co-founded E8 Storage, sold it to AWS, then led the EBS dev team from the inside. Ilovich ran product at Taboola, Pagaya, and Fleetonomy before Via scooped that one up. These aren’t tourists. They’re locals in the cloud chaos. So they founded Datafy Inc., because apparently, “Autonomous Storage Scaling for People Who’d Rather Not Light Their Money on Fire” didn’t fit on the AWS Marketplace listing.
And let’s talk results. Via Transportation plugged in and saw fully automated storage scaling with zero downtime. H2O.ai cut EBS costs by 40% without giving up an ounce of flexibility. This isn’t a maybe. It’s a matter of math. The kind that gets you up to 60% in cost savings, zero engineering hours to implement, and a system that scales without that 3 a.m. Slack ping from DevOps. One line of code. No lifting. No guessing. No “best practices” PDF to forget you bookmarked.
Investors didn’t need a TED Talk to catch the signal. Bessemer Venture Partners led the new $20 million seed round, yes, a seed round. When you’ve got Adam Fisher, who’s helped push over a dozen Israeli startups to the exit sign, betting on your math, you’re not raising for hype. You’re raising because the numbers demand it. Insight Partners doubled down, with Liad Agmon, of Dynamic Yield and McDonald’s $300 million acquisition fame, coming back for more. When return investors show up with bigger checks, they’re not following the trend. They’re following conviction.
So what’s next? Datafy’s headed straight into the U.S. market, where AI infrastructure is scaling like a startup at an open bar. Their platform already runs on any Linux distro, works seamlessly with EC2, EKS, ECS, and is 100% SOC2 compliant. No recommendations. No dashboards begging for your attention. Just cold, hard optimization, running on a low-level storage engine that does what most humans can’t, or won’t.
This isn’t a product. It’s a wake-up call for every AWS-heavy startup bleeding budget without even knowing it. Enterprises building in AI, transportation, and big data better take note: the cloud’s been playing you. Datafy is the fix.
