Yuki, a data infrastructure optimization startup, has raised a $6 million seed round led by Hyperwise Ventures, with participation from VelocitX, Tal Ventures, Fresh.fund, and Yakir Daniel, co-founder of Spot.io (acquired by NetApp and now part of Flexera). The funding will accelerate Yuki’s mission to give CIOs and CTOs a unified control layer for governing data lake costs, performance, and execution behavior as AI workloads place unprecedented pressure on modern data infrastructure.

As organizations expand AI initiatives, data platforms such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and Iceberg-based data lakes are experiencing rapidly increasing query volumes, unpredictable compute consumption, and growing difficulty in enforcing workload priorities.

For Snowflake cost optimization in particular, controlling warehouse sprawl, unpredictable workload behavior, and rising compute costs has become a major CIO and CTO concern. For CIOs, this shows up as runaway cloud spend and budget volatility. For CTOs, it appears as architectural chaos: competing workloads, inconsistent execution behavior, and no unified system governing how data platforms operate in real time.

Yuki addresses this gap by introducing a real-time control plane that governs execution across data infrastructure. At the core of the platform is Yuki Fabric, an AI-driven optimization model that continuously learns workload behavior, SLA requirements, and cost-performance tradeoffs, then enforces execution policies that reduce waste while protecting business-critical workloads. The control plane operates above vendors and below workloads, enabling consistent governance across platforms without changing application code or queries.

“After building Spot, it was easy for me to recognize the pain point Yuki is solving. They’re building the control layer for data cost optimization just as AI is turning data spend into a board-level issue,” said Yakir Daniel, co-founder of Spot.io (acquired by NetApp and now part of Flexera), who joined Yuki’s seed round and gave his vote of confidence to the team.

Yuki provides unified governance across Snowflake, BigQuery, and Iceberg-based data lakes, where teams often share the same compute resources despite having very different performance, reliability, and budget requirements. By enforcing workload-aware execution in real time, Yuki prevents runaway compute consumption, reduces infrastructure duplication, and ensures that premium resources are reserved for workloads that truly require them.

According to the company, customers using Yuki’s platform have saved an average of approximately 42.6% on their data infrastructure costs. In large enterprise environments, these savings can reach millions of dollars annually. More importantly, cost reduction becomes a system outcome rather than a recurring manual optimization effort.

“Data is the only core resource in organizations that no one truly governs,” said Ido Arieli Noga, CEO and co-founder of Yuki. “CIOs need economic predictability, and CTOs need architectural control. Yuki was built to provide both. We make data infrastructure workload-aware, governed in real time, and economically predictable, which becomes critical as AI multiplies the number of experiments, models, and pipelines running across the organization.”

Yuki’s business model is aligned with outcomes. The company charges a fee as a percentage of the actual savings generated. If no savings are created, customers do not pay.

The cloud management and data optimization market includes hundreds of vendors, but most focus on monitoring and reporting rather than execution-time governance. As enterprises increasingly adopt Iceberg architectures that decouple storage and compute, the need for a control plane that governs workload behavior across platforms is becoming foundational infrastructure.

Among Yuki’s customers are cybersecurity companies such as Tenable and data-intensive media companies such as Angel Studios, which rely on predictable performance, strict SLA enforcement, and continuous cost control.

Founded in 2025 by Ido Arieli Noga (CEO) and Amir Peres (CTO), Yuki employs 15 people, most of whom are based in its Israeli R&D center, with additional team members in the United States and the United Kingdom. The new funding will be used to expand product capabilities, deepen support for additional data platforms, and accelerate go-to-market growth in the U.S.