Thoras helps businesses achieve reliability without overspending on cloud costs

For years, twin sisters Nilo Rahmani and Jane Rahmani shared stories — and commiserated — about the pain points they faced in their engineering careers.

Nilo told TechCrunch that one of the recurring topics of conversation was frustration with the reliability platforms they were using at work. When they noticed that the reliability landscape was starting to change a few years ago, they thought they had the perfect experience to build the right reliability solution for where the industry was headed.

“Previously, reliability was the priority at all costs,” Nilo told TechCrunch. “Now (businesses) are paying more attention to cloud costs. The entire industry is being paralyzed by these costs and the challenge grows exponentially as the business grows.

The Rahmani sisters decided to launch Thoras to find a happy medium that would allow businesses to find reliability without overwhelming cloud resources. The Washington, D.C.-based company uses artificial intelligence to help engineers quickly find and detect the root cause of software failures. Thoras also helps organizations discover improvement opportunities within reliability to help save cloud costs.

Thoras claims it can help companies find and resolve issues 70% faster than other methods while saving up to 60% on cloud costs.

The platform is designed to predict demand fluctuations so companies can more efficiently prepare for potential reliability disruptions and leverage appropriate cloud resources in advance, said CEO Nilo.

Cloud observability already includes a number of players including New Relic, Splunk, and Dynatrace. This category also appears poised to grow as artificial intelligence advances. Linux and cloud infrastructure company SUSE announced A new cloud monitoring tool In November 2024.

Nilo said what she believes helps Thoras stand out is its approach to artificial intelligence. While Thoras leverages machine learning technology, she said the company’s software is not overly leveraged for large language models. Instead, Thoras opts for smaller models with a clearer return on investment. She added that many of their competitors rely on these LLM certificates, which are not always accurate and can lead to the company over-consuming resources.

Thoras came out of stealth in January 2024 and raised a $1.5 million pre-funding round in March 2024. The company has seen its revenue grow 360% in the past nine months. The company is now announcing new funding it has raised to help keep up with customer demand.

The startup has raised $5 million in a seed round led by Wellington Ventures with participation from Sinewave Ventures, Focal Ventures, and Storytime Capital, among other investors. The company plans to allocate capital to hiring engineers, building the product and keeping up with demand.

“This round was much smoother,” Nilo said, comparing it to the company’s pre-seed round. “We had the momentum and metrics that demonstrated we understood product-market fit and what we needed to do to get to the next level.”

Thoras has focused on Kubernetes environments, which was intentional, but Nilo said part of its future product expansion will include moving into other types of cloud software as well.

Jane, the chief operating officer, told TechCrunch that she and Nilo never thought they would launch a company together — nor did their immigrant parents, who were surprised that they were interested in giving up the security that their full-time jobs provided. But Jane described her and Nilo as a “power couple” who uses their relationship as twins to better solve problems.

“At first, (our parents) were confused and nervous for us,” Nilo said. “They’ve always believed in us. Now they’re thrilled to see what we’re doing.”