back to resources Founder Story: Roi Ravhon, CEO and co-founder of Finout Pitango January 29, 2025 Roi Ravhon, CEO and co-founder of Finout: Teaching the FinOps Market to Jump In this interview, Finout CEO Roi Ravhon discusses what happens when a company’s vision is ahead of its target market and how, sometimes, you need to make mistakes. He is joined by Eyal Niv, a Managing Partner at Pitango, who sheds light on what he looks for in a bold startup and why he was persuaded to invest in Finout from its seed round. Businesses heavily dependent on various cloud-based services often find it impossible to accurately identify, evaluate and manage their cloud spend. Finout, founded in 2021, was designed to change all that. The first self-service cloud cost observability and management platform, Finout consolidates data and enhances FinOps with clear insights into usage-based solution expenditures, resource allocation and cost-effectiveness. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Roi, and how you came to found Finout. Roi: My professional journey got started in the Israeli Intelligence Unit 8200, where I was trained in programming and spent seven years. We were doing DevOps when DevOps was not yet a thing, so my initial experience of this industry was essentially as it was being built. After the army, I joined a company called Logz.io, when it was 10 people sitting in a bridal salon in the Tel Aviv Port – the best office ever – and started out as a DevOps engineer. Eventually, I became the engineering director and was responsible for managing the cloud financials. As Logz.io, also a Pitango portfolio company, was migrating to more complex cloud-based infrastructure, adding services, expanding into new regions and moving workloads to different platforms, it became harder to know how much money was actually spent on the cloud, what the profitability margin was for each transaction, and what each business unit cost to run. At the time, we were using one of the market leaders in FinOps, but it was not enough for the complexity we faced. So, we started building capabilities on top of it in-house. And we failed miserably. It was a lot more complicated than we thought it would be. But it was a stepping stone to Finout. I decided to leave the company and partner with another ex-Logz.io colleague, Asaf Liveanu, and an old friend, Izhar Gilboa. As I recall, we launched Finout on Thanksgiving four years ago, then we watched the football game and didn’t have to wake up for work afterwards. Co-founder & CPO Asaf Liveanu, Co-founder & CEO Roi Ravhan, and the Co-founder & CTO Yizhar Gilboa And how did Pitango become involved? Eyal: I was consulting with Roi regarding another company we were looking at when he was still at Logz.io. Every time I consider investing in a company, I ask the best people within the same portfolio to give me their perspective. I was told Roi knows the subject matter better than anybody else and that’s how we initially met. Roi shared that he was starting a company with Asaf and Yizhar because they realized there was a big problem that was just getting bigger. The cost of cloud infrastructure was increasing and it was becoming more of a black box, so analyzing the cost per customer, cost per function, was getting harder to do. And there wasn’t an effective solution on the market. After meeting with Finout, I still didn’t know if their solution would work – but I immediately knew they were a good team. They complement each other and they are passionate about solving this huge, difficult problem of analyzing cloud-based costs. How would you describe what Finout does? Roi: We help manage cloud cost at scale for enterprises. Finout is built on three main pillars: Analyzing the past – helping companies understand what already happened, with reporting, dashboarding, identifying expenditure anomalies, and the like. Predicting the future – budgeting, forecasting, financial planning, and everything else needed to reach cost-efficiency targets. Democratizing FinOps – helping entire organizations adopt a FinOps mentality, understand cloud costs and make more data-driven decisions. When you set out, did you have a clear idea of what Finout would be? Roi: Yes, but it turned out that we had gotten ahead of ourselves. We saw the end game – understanding cost per customer, the impact on the business, better and deeper margin analysis for the cloud customer. And that really resonated with companies in the validation calls we made. But once we got to the large US enterprises, we heard things like, “Amazing. But what’s FinOps?” The problem was more elemental than we assumed. We thought that an enterprise would only need an analytics platform to help them connect the cloud cost dots. In reality, most of the market was still struggling just to understand what their costs even were. Going from uncertainty about how much money they were paying to AWS, for example, to dissecting cost per customer was too big of a jump. They needed web reporting, dashboards, Kubernetes cost calculations, budget recommendations – all sorts of things we hadn’t intended to deal with because we thought the market had grown past them. So we had to adjust, starting with basic observability. We maintained our vision of the end goal, but we embraced the fact that we’d have to build all the necessary steppingstones to help our customers get there. Eyal: It’s common for innovators to think that what they’ve invented is what people need and often don’t realize that it is part of a larger incumbent solution. People don’t want multiple layers of solutions, even when their current solution is not good enough. So they set out to replace the whole stack and ended up creating a paradigm shift. What kind of challenges did you encounter along the way? Roi: We had to enter a well-established market of giants and differentiate ourselves enough to get people to make the switch, to overhaul their day-to-day operations, and to adopt a FinOps mentality. We underestimated how complicated it was going to be to build an enterprise-ready product for that market. But thankfully, we had investors that understood that as well. Everyone says that they’re building a platform, but we actually had to build enough integrated applications to become the system of choice for our customer base. But once it clicked, it clicked. Image credit: Finout How do you deal with unexpected bumps along the road? Eyal: First and foremost, if you’ve done your validation right, then you’re convinced about the team and the company. If you’re convinced, then you won’t be moved by every bump along the road to the long-term goal. So, you accept that it’s going to cost more than you thought, but in the end there’s going to be a payoff. And by the way, from the beginning Finout sales traction was good. Even if they needed to build a bigger suite than we initially thought for customers to sign up. Many times with seed investments you realize that the market is actually much smaller than anticipated. In the case of Finout, the market kept getting bigger – and we just needed to run faster. Roi: As an entrepreneur, you need to do the legwork. You need to talk to people, you need to build, you need to make mistakes, you need to understand the market. And regardless of how prepared you are, it’s impossible to predict everything. Good investors will find the balance between giving you freedom and asking the right questions – even if they are tough questions. That is precisely what we got from Eyal at those initial stages and it created the trust that we are in this together even if we fall into the mud. That support and encouragement gives you the confidence to run and make those mistakes – some of which are really, really important to make. Eyal: Honesty from founders is the most important thing, because they are going to make mistakes.It’s part of the game. And if you want the best outcomes, they’ve got to have the courage and the openness to recognize them and make the necessary changes. That also means that we, as investors, need to understand that if we were in their place, we would make mistakes as well. We may have our own opinions, but founders understand their business best and are doing what they are most passionate about. Look, I love basketball, but I’m not a player. I can be a coach, I can be a manager, but respect has to be paid to the players who make decisions on the court in real time. You cannot replicate that. We need only say, “Let’s make the correction, move forward, and make more mistakes.” After all, my only measure of success is their success. How do you see the future of Finout, in light of the increasing importance of cloud cost? Roi: Currently, financial governance is managed within ERP systems. It’s how we show chargebacks, handle internal billing, manage territories, workforce planning, forecasting, and everything in between. But the value we get from the ERP starts to diminish the more we move to OPEX, because that application is not smart enough to provide more than a single undifferentiated expense line for complex solutions like AWS, Databricks, Snowflake, OpenAI, cyber, and even some modern labor costs. Our vision for Finout is to become the ERP of the cloud native world. We are currently building what we call the CRP – the Cloud Resource Planner. We will feed existing ERPs and will start to replace them. We are creating a new system of record for organization, and are working toward connecting multiple stakeholders in different corporate departments, such as finance, procurement, engineering, marketing, product development. Ultimately, everyone will need access to the new comprehensive data system, which they will not be able to get anywhere else. Eyal, how do you see the long-term impact of Finout on the ecosystem? Eyal: The macro long-term vision I see is that companies will be mostly product people that will develop an idea or build a product with a lot of external resources, including AI. And the most important element of managing these external technology resources is going to be a system like Finout. I believe Finout will be the operating system of future businesses, which will be built differently than legacy businesses, allowing you to monitor and control all the elements at play. Image credit: Finout With all the ups and downs, how do you keep the team at Finout motivated? Roi: I think a mission brings many people together. We keep on reiterating what we’re after at all levels of the company. We believe in transparency and letting everyone’s voice be heard. We share everything we can – what we’re doing well, what we’re not doing well, every deal, every feature – so everyone at Finout has a clear understanding of where we are and where we want to go. And I’m a big believer in keeping everyone aligned with a common goal. Once you see the company is growing, along with its impact in the market, the motivation fuels itself. Eyal: With the perspective of a hundred or so companies in action, I observed that Roi paid a lot of attention to ensuring transparency from day one. Right from the beginning we, as investors, were getting reports with the detail level you normally see in a public company’s investor relations documents. It was amazing and it felt like Finout was born mature, with a transparency that included admitting to mistakes, which is not trivial. It’s being brave and convicted about what you do, especially for a first-time CEO. So what advice would you give a founder who is just starting out? Roi: If you begin this journey because you want to get rich or be famous, it’s not going to work. You need to feel that there’s just no other option and nothing would fulfill you more than starting your own business. And if you don’t have that, I would recommend you don’t try. But if you do, then pick the right investors. People overlook the importance of personal relationships with early-stage partners. It’s not the proxies and value creation and connections – focus on finding investors you want to spend a lot of time with in good situations and bad. Do a lot of due diligence and don’t just grab the first money you’re offered and run with it. Make sure that you can build a working relationship of trust. I know I can call Eyal with any problem I have, regardless of how dumb it is or what I need from him. And Eyal is always ready to reply, “Got it. I’m going to help you.” Eyal: It’s a journey. It’s a very romantic journey, I must say, with good parts and bad. Many times, you’ll start something and it won’t turn out well. But I like to invest in people who are very passionate about what they do and I always say: even if we fail, we’ll have a good time. Let’s not fail, though. back to resources