AWS block storage cost-cutting startup Datafy has secured $14 million in new funding, bringing total investment to $20 million.
Datafy’s background goes back to early all-flash array days and Israeli startup E8. This was founded in 2014 by CEO Zivan Ori, VP R&D Alex Friedman, and Ziv Serlin, Director of Systems Architecture. They built storage technology providing NVMe-oF access to an all-flash array and the product was successful enough for Amazon to buy E8 for a reported $50-60 million in 2019.
Ori then became EBS (Elastic Block Store) Director of Storage Development inside AWS, still based in Israel, with Serlin becoming an AWS Principal Engineer, and Friedman an AWS Senior Software Development Manager. Ori and Serlin gained a lot of deep knowledge about EBS and the two, along with Chief Product Officer Yoav Ilovich, founded Datafy in August 2023.

They reckoned they could cut EBS costs and developed a free sensor to monitor EBS storage usage in real-time, and autonomous software to provide zero-downtime auto-scaling. The new funding validates its progress and we’re told several AWS Premier Partners are already part of Datafy’s ecosystem.
Ori stated: “Storage demands are at an all-time high, and businesses need efficiency without complexity. This latest funding validates the strong customer traction we’ve seen and allows us to scale quickly to meet growing demand.”

The cash will be used to accelerate Datafy’s growth in the US, with more selling partners and new cloud block storage optimizations.
Ophir Zahavi, Senior Manager, Cloud Engineering, at agentic AI company H2O.ai, said: “With Datafy, we reduced EBS costs by 40 percent where possible, while maintaining the flexibility to automatically scale cloud storage as needed. The performance improvements were immediate, and the solution’s simplicity and reliability truly stood out.”
Datafy will be competing with Volumez, which also provides cloud block storage optimization technology through pooling instances and scaling capacity and performance, and Flexera, which bought NetApp’s Spot and CloudCheckr cloud instance cost optimizers.