StitcherAI emerges from stealth with $3M and a different take on the AI spending problem

StitcherAI, backed by $3 million in pre-seed funding, launched today with an unusual approach to help companies get a handle on AI and cloud spending before the bills get out of control. Founded by a pair of Seattle enterprise tech veterans, the startup is avoiding the traditional FinOps dashboard, instead pushing real-time cost data directly into apps and services where engineers — and increasingly AI agents — are making spending decisions. The idea is to catch spending problems before they happen. AI agents, in particular, often have no context for the company’s budget or existing contracts. For example, an agent might choose an expensive AI model when the company has already prepaid for a cheaper alternative. “It’s really important to get that context into the places where the decisions are happening, whether it’s human or the agent,” said StitcherAI CEO and co-founder Udam Dewaraja. The 10-person company emerged from stealth 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 the global IT finance practice at Citi, one of the world’s largest technology spenders. He also co-created the FOCUS open billing data standard now used by AWS, Microsoft, and Google, which StitcherAI also uses as part of its system. Co-founder Varun Mittal is an AI researcher and natural language processing specialist who previously ran NLPCore, a Seattle-based NLP platform company, for eight years. Dewaraja and Mittal previously worked together at Apptio, the Bellevue-based IT financial management company that was taken private in 2019 and acquired by IBM in 2023. Apptio is one of the companies StitcherAI will be competing against in the broader field of tracking IT spending. Dewaraja led engineering for Cloudability, Apptio’s cloud cost management product. Other established players in the space include Flexera and VMware’s CloudHealth, along with many startups focused on cloud and AI cost management. Dewaraja said he saw the limitations of the dashboard approach firsthand when he moved to Citi and became a buyer of the tools he’d helped build. Engineers are too busy juggling security, performance, and deployment issues to check a financial dashboard. “Cost becomes a forgotten part,” he said. StitcherAI’s platform pulls in cost data from across the different services used by a company, including cloud providers, AI services, SaaS subscriptions, and PDF invoices. It then creates a unified cost model with information on different products, teams, and revenue streams. The platform presents the data in whatever tools the organization uses, including data platforms like Snowflake, business intelligence tools like Tableau, or workplace apps like Slack and Jira. It can also feed financial context into AI coding tools like Cursor and OpenAI’s Codex, so agents making technical decisions have visibility into the budgets and contracts. The company says it is already working with several large customers, including nine-figure cloud spenders with rapidly growing AI budgets. One early customer is a Fortune 500 employment marketplace. StitcherAI says those beta customers reduced the cost of building and maintaining internal IT finance infrastructure by 80% on average. Dewaraja said the startup plans to use the funding to grow the team and continue developing its platform, with the FinOps X conference in San Diego in June as its next major milestone.