Yuki Emerges from Stealth with $6M to Tackle Spiraling AI Data Costs

NEW YORK: Data cost optimization startup Yuki emerged from stealth today with $6 million in seed funding to address what enterprises describe as unmanageable AI and data infrastructure expenses driven by rigid, one-size-fits-all compute models.

The round was led by Hyperwise Ventures, with participation from VelocitX, Tal Ventures, Fresh.fund, and Yakir Daniel, founder of Spot.io (now part of Flexera). Daniel stated, “They’re building the control layer for data cost optimization just as AI is turning data spend into a board-level issue.”

Ido Arieli Noga, Yuki’s CEO, emphasized, “Data is the only resource in an organization that no one truly manages. We know how to store it, but not how to govern it.” He also highlighted that traditional infrastructure lacks control systems for data workloads themselves. Noga added, “For years, the default response to growth was to burn more money on the same one-size-fits-all infrastructure. That model is fundamentally broken, and it doesn’t scale in an AI-driven world.”

Yuki’s AI-powered control plane continuously learns workload behavior, service-level agreements, and cost-performance tradeoffs, routing queries to optimal compute resources in real time. The platform distinguishes between business-critical tasks and lower-priority internal processes, enabling dynamic resource allocation without code changes.

Early customers using Yuki’s platform in 2025 achieved average cost reductions of 42.6 percent, representing millions in savings for large enterprises. Customers include cybersecurity firm Tenable and media company Angel Studios.

The platform addresses inefficiencies where teams with different SLAs, budgets, and performance needs share identical compute resources. As enterprises adopt Apache Iceberg to decouple storage and compute, Yuki provides “the missing intelligence layer that governs how workloads consume those resources,” according to the company.

Founded in 2025 by childhood friends Noga and CTO Amir Peres, Yuki employs 15 people across Israel, the United States, and United Kingdom. The funding will expand Israeli R&D operations, deepen product capabilities, add support for additional data platforms, and scale U.S. sales efforts.