StitcherAI is coming out of a $3M venture with a different take on the AI capitalization problem
StitcherAI, backed by $3 million in pre-seed funding, launched today in an unusual way to help companies get a handle on AI and cloud deployments before debt gets out of control.
Founded by Seattle enterprise tech veterans, the startup eschews the traditional FinOps dashboard, instead pushing real-time cost data directly into apps and services where developers — and increasingly AI agents — make spending decisions.
The idea is to catch spending problems before they happen. AI agents, in particular, often don’t have the context of a company’s budget or existing contracts. For example, an agent may choose an expensive AI model if the company has already paid for a cheaper alternative.
“It’s really important to put that context in the places where decisions are made, whether it’s a person or an agent,” said StitcherAI CEO and co-founder Udam Dewaraja.
The 10-person company came out of the blue on Tuesday morning with the announcement of the general availability of its product. Its $3 million pre-seed round, raised last fall, was led by Founders Co-op with participation from Sunshine Lake VC, Ascend, and Plug & Play Ventures.
Dewaraja built a global IT finance practice at Citi, one of the world’s largest spenders. He also co-developed the FOCUS open payment data standard that is now used by AWS, Microsoft, and Google, which StitcherAI also uses as part of its system.
Founder Varun Mittal is an AI researcher and natural language processing expert who previously ran NLPCore, an NLP platform company based in Seattle, for eight years.
Dewaraja and Mittal previously worked together at Apptio, a Bellevue-based IT financial management company that was taken private in 2019 and acquired by IBM in 2023.
Apptio is one of the companies that StitcherAI will be competing against in the broader field of IT usage tracking. Dewaraja led the engineering of Cloudability, Apptio’s cloud cost management product. Other established players in the space include Flexera and VMware’s CloudHealth, as well as a number of startups focused on cloud cost management and AI.
Dewaraja said he saw firsthand the limitations of the dashboard when he moved to Citi and became a buyer of the tools he helped build. Developers are busy discussing security, performance, and deployment issues to test the financial dashboard.
“Cost becomes the forgotten part,” he said.
The StitcherAI platform pulls cost data from all the different services a company uses, including cloud providers, AI services, SaaS subscriptions, and PDF invoices. It then creates an integrated cost model with information on different products, teams, and revenue streams.
The platform presents data to any tools an organization uses, including data platforms like Snowflake, business intelligence tools like Tableau, or workplace apps like Slack and Jira. It can also add financial context to AI coding tools like Cursor and OpenAI’s Codex, so that technical decision-making agents can see budgets and contracts.
The company says it already works with several large customers, including nine cloud spenders with rapidly growing AI budgets. One early customer is a Fortune 500 employment marketplace. StitcherAI says those beta customers have reduced the cost of building and maintaining internal IT financial infrastructure by 80% on average.
Dewaraja said plans are underway to use the funding to grow the team and continue to develop its platform, with the FinOps X conference in San Diego in June as the next milestone.
