Portugal Startup News

Cloudsweep has launched a pilot program for its AI-powered platform, which reduces cloud waste and enhances team productivity by analyzing code and automatically generating fixes, with a broader release planned for October 2025.

The Portuguese startup was born out of its founders’ frustration with cloud bills growing faster than their applications. 

Co-founders Jorge Rodrigues and André Simões – both with decades of experience in cloud infrastructure, microservices, analytics, and cost reduction projects – saw that most FinOps tools could show where money was going but not explain why or how to fix it. 

They identified code-level inefficiencies as the blind spot in cloud cost management and built Cloudsweep to close that gap.

“As startups and enterprises scale, technical debt grows. Engineering teams, under pressure to deliver features quickly, inevitably create code that’s costly to run at SaaS scale,” Rodrigues, the company’s CEO, told Portugal Startup News, adding that inefficiencies hidden in millions of lines of code are impossible to track even for the best teams. 

The hidden cost 

As Simões, Cloudsweep’s chief technology officer, explains, the real cost isn’t just in dollars but in distraction. “I [recently] spoke with a CTO who shared something that resonated deeply: ‘My best engineers spend 30% of their time in cost meetings instead of building features our customers love.’” 

The founders argue that this constant drain on focus and productivity creates what they call “the hidden cost of cloud cost.”  

Beyond high bills, endless debates over budgets can stall product roadmaps, dominate meetings, and push teams into short-term fixes such as under-provisioning that later add technical debt. Blame spreads when bills spike, and morale falls as engineers feel restricted and innovation slows.

Simões says this human toll is often underestimated. “Every hour your team spends analyzing AWS bills, debating resource allocation, or hunting down that mysterious spike in spend is an hour not spent on innovation. Your engineers became engineers to solve problems and create value – not to become part-time accountants.”

This is not just a technology problem but a human one, he noted, adding that Cloudsweep takes a different approach by making cost optimization “automated, continuous, and invisible” so teams can focus on what they do best.

Code-level automation

Rodrigues describes Cloudsweep as “an always-on AI software engineer – continuously scanning codebases, deployments, and new releases to detect inefficiencies before they spiral into major cost drains.”

The result, according to him, is a “permanent safeguard” against technical debt, ensuring the right balance between performance and cost.  

The company positions its platform as the “only” AI FinOps agent that rewrites code to erase overspend autonomously.

Cloudsweep integrates directly into development workflows, combining code analysis with telemetry, billing data, and each customer’s cloud pricing plan to automatically generate pull requests for engineers to review.

Rodrigues said this more complete approach sets them apart from competitors and is “something that is new in the market.”

Early results and coverage

Currently, Cloudsweep supports applications built in Java (Spring Boot), Python (Django, Flask, FastAPI), C# (.NET), and Node.js (Express, NestJS), but plans to expand quickly.

“We are already moving to cover the remaining cloud providers,” Rodrigues said. “We are also very open to listening to our customers’ needs and revising our coverage roadmap.”

A growing industry challenge

Cloud cost management has become a critical issue for enterprises worldwide as they try to balance rising demand for cloud services with budgets increasingly strained by inefficiencies and overspend. 

According to Flexera’s 2024 State of the Cloud Report, 75% of organizations reported rising levels of cloud waste, with an average of 32% of their cloud budgets being lost to inefficiencies. 

The FinOps in Focus 2025 study by Harness estimates that $44.5 billion in enterprise cloud spend will be wasted this year due to underutilized resources and disconnect between finance and engineering. 

More than half of engineering leaders (52%) say this gap drives unnecessary costs, while developers themselves report limited visibility into idle or orphaned resources and over- or under-provisioned workloads. Without real-time data, 55% admit that cloud purchasing commitments are often based on guesswork.

ROI and long-term goals

Rodrigues said Cloudsweep is built for this environment, where costs are high and organizational strain is growing. Their minimum viable product has delivered 20–30% savings, and the solution targets stakeholders across the organization.

For CTOs and VPs of Engineering, the platform promises to “turn your engineering team into cost-conscious builders without slowing them down.” For CFOs and FinOps teams, it offers a way to “finally understand and fix the technical root causes behind your cloud spend.” And for developers, it means being able to “see the real-world cost impact of your code and architecture decisions.”

“Our target is to provide 10x return on investment for our customers, not only in direct cloud cost savings but also on the effort required to detect and implement code and infrastructure fixes that would normally require multidisciplinary collaboration,” Rodrigues explained.  

He added that the company’s long-term goal is to make cost management a standard operating procedure for software engineering teams, as security or code quality are. 

Pilot program scope

The pilot program, which opened on September 15, is limited to five to 10 participants. Participants will receive free access during the program and, once the platform goes live, a two-year price lock with a 20% discount over the lowest rate. 

Rodrigues said the pilot has two objectives: “Validating effectiveness in real-world environments by testing the software across diverse customer scenarios, and delivering tangible value to pilot customers while gathering feedback that sharpens the product.” 

He noted that internal testing and open-source benchmarking had already demonstrated strong results, but said collaboration with customers would ensure the platform operates reliably at scale, helping teams cut cloud costs at the source.

Featured image: Co-founder and CEO Jorge Rodrigues, leading Cloudsweep’s mission to cut cloud costs at the source. (Photo courtesy of Cloudsweep)