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Mat Ellis

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Mat Ellis is a British-born technology entrepreneur and investor based in Portland, Oregon.[1][2] Mat Ellis co-founded Cloudability, a cloud cost management company, in Portland in 2011. Ellis was chief executive of Cloudability until 2019. Apptio acquired Cloudability in 2019.[3][4] Cloudability is closely associated with the rise of FinOps, the practice of treating variable cloud spending as a shared responsibility of finance, engineering and business teams. At the time of the acquisition, Apptio said the Cloudability platform managed more than nine billion dollars of enterprise cloud spending.[3][5]

Mat Ellis is the founder and chief executive of Sixty AI, a Portland software startup.[6] Sixty AI publishes Tokematic. Tokematic is AI usage and cost-management software that opened its public beta in November 2026.[7] Ellis is also the managing partner of Cloudy Ventures, an early stage venture fund. He works as an advisor and fractional executive with Pacific Northwest software companies.[1]

Early career[edit]

Mat Ellis was born in Brighton, England.[2] Ellis attended Brighton College from 1984 to 1989.[8] He started his first business at the age of 15, a story he told in a 2014 Oregon Entrepreneurs Network talk titled CEO at Age 15.[8]

Before Cloudability, Ellis worked in technology roles in several industries. His employers included Goldman Sachs, PepsiCo, LineOne, LookSmart, Connexus and Adknowledge, and he founded a company called Tecnh.[1] He held executive positions at four startups and technology roles at Frito-Lay, Pepsi-Cola and Goldman Sachs.[9]

Career[edit]

Cloudability (2011 to 2019)[edit]

Mat Ellis founded Cloudability in Portland in February 2011 with J.R. Storment and Jon Frisby. Ellis was chief executive of Cloudability until June 2019.[1][7][10] Cloudability was a member of the first class of the Portland Incubator Experiment. The advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy ran the Portland Incubator Experiment. Cloudability was headquartered in Portland’s Pearl District.[11] Cloudability opened its public beta on November 2, 2011.[7] Cloudability helped businesses track and manage what they spent on cloud services. Ellis described it as the Google Analytics of cloud spending.[12]

Cloudability raised $1.1 million in seed funding in late 2011 and an $8.7 million Series A in July 2012. Foundry Group led the Series A, joined by 500 Startups, Trinity Ventures and Wieden+Kennedy.[12] Accounts of the total raised differ. GeekWire reported $39.8 million, Ellis’s own site says $44 million, and Ellis told GeekWire in 2019 that the company had raised $55 million in equity and debt.[4][1][13] In 2015 Cloudability acquired RipFog, another Portland startup, to add a data analytics team.[14]

In June 2017 Ellis told an Oregon legislative committee that Cloudability had grown from three employees to nearly 100 in Portland, with a median salary above $100,000.[15] By the time of its sale the company had about 125 employees, according to Apptio’s chief executive.[13] Apptio named Atlassian, BP, Sony and Gannett among its customers and said the platform managed more than $9 billion in enterprise cloud spending across the three largest public clouds.[3] A 2022 announcement put the amount Cloudability had optimized at almost $10 billion.[16]

Apptio announced a definitive agreement to acquire Cloudability on May 16, 2019. Terms were not disclosed.[3][5] Ellis had been raising a Series C round, and the deal came together in about a month.[13] He called it easily the better option.[5] Apptio said it would keep the Portland office as an engineering center.[13] His resignation as chief executive was reported at the start of July 2019. He said he planned to pursue the hobbies he no longer had time for as a chief executive, “like sleeping and eating well”.[4]

FinOps and the FinOps Foundation[edit]

FinOps, short for cloud financial operations, is the practice of managing variable cloud spending as a shared responsibility of finance, engineering and business teams.[17] Cloudability used the term for its own framework and promoted it to customers.[18]

The FinOps Foundation was founded in February 2019. The FinOps Foundation grew out of Cloudability’s quarterly customer advisory board meetings, where practitioners had asked for a community to discuss practices beyond any one vendor’s tools. Cloudability helped underwrite the organization and gave it legal and administrative support.[17] Founding members included Atlassian, Autodesk, HERE Technologies, Just Eat, Nationwide and Spotify.[19] The FinOps Foundation became part of the Linux Foundation in June 2020. The FinOps Foundation maintains the FinOps Framework, practitioner training and the FOCUS billing data specification.[17]

Sixty AI and Tokematic[edit]

Mat Ellis founded Sixty AI after leaving Cloudability. Sixty AI first operated as FasterBetter, and Ellis was its chief executive by November 2022.[16] Ellis has been founder and chief executive of Sixty AI since March 2023.[10] Sixty AI raised a $3.5 million seed round in June 2023. 468 Capital led the seed round.[6] Jon Frisby is the chief technology officer of Sixty AI. Frisby co-founded Cloudability with Ellis.[7] Sixty AI set out to build personal relationship management software that uses AI to filter digital noise. Announcing the round, Ellis said that software had eaten the world and that humans were now on the menu.[6]

Sixty AI publishes Tokematic.[20] Tokematic opened its public beta on November 2, 2026, fifteen years to the day after Cloudability’s own beta. Ellis and Frisby describe Tokematic as Cloudability for AI. Tokematic tracks AI subscriptions, quotas, balances and reset times across several services, and ties the cost of AI coding sessions to the code changes they produce.[7] Ellis has argued that this market will form faster than the last one. Cloud spending took 15 years to reach a trillion dollars a year, he said, and AI will be much bigger much sooner.[7]

Investing, boards and advisory work[edit]

Mat Ellis was a venture partner at Oregon Venture Fund from December 2019 to December 2021.[10] Ellis was a board member of Finout from November 2022 to November 2025. Finout is a cloud cost management company.[16][10] He has also served on the boards of the Technology Association of Oregon, the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network and Twenty20.[9][21]

Ellis founded Cloudy Ventures in May 2020. Ellis is the managing partner of Cloudy Ventures.[1][10] Cloudy Ventures is an early stage venture fund that invests in education, community and fintech companies in the Pacific Northwest.[1] Cloudy Ventures was formerly named Sunny Ventures.[22] In April 2026 he announced a fractional executive practice for SaaS, AI and infrastructure companies in the region.[21] The practice typically works one to five days a month with companies that have between $3 million and $60 million in annual recurring revenue.[1]

Approach and views[edit]

Mat Ellis writes about cloud spending on his site, Cloudy Portland. In a 2026 essay he argued that cloud cost management is not really about cost, and framed cloud budgets as a supply chain question.[23] In another, marking twenty years of cloud computing, he wrote that companies still treat cloud spending like a data center bill and should let go of capital expenditure thinking.[24]

He has also taken public positions on Oregon business policy. In June 2017 he testified in favor of a corporate activities tax to fund the state’s schools, while noting that he had opposed an earlier ballot measure on corporate taxes.[15]

Ellis describes company building as a team effort. The tagline of his site is “Great companies are built together”.[25] He applies named operating methods in his work with companies, including EOS and an approach he calls Dignitocracy.[1]

Reception[edit]

Apptio, announcing the acquisition, described Cloudability as the market leader in multi-cloud financial management and FinOps.[3] GeekWire noted that Apptio had loomed as a competitor since 2011.[13] Other companies in the market included CloudHealth, which VMware acquired in 2018.[26]

Coverage has also noted the commercial logic behind the company’s community building. TechTarget reported in 2019 that Cloudability hoped to gain awareness and business from the framework it called FinOps, and the FinOps Foundation acknowledges that Cloudability provided its initial underwriting.[18][17]

Some of Cloudability’s market claims were self-reported. A 2017 Bloomberg Businessweek article on cloud cost startups cited the company’s own statement that it managed about ten percent of the $8.7 billion spent on Amazon Web Services in the first nine months of 2016, and its claim that it could save the average customer twenty percent or more.[27]

Awards and recognition[edit]

Mat Ellis received the Tom Holce Individual Achievement Award from the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network in 2013.[8][21] Silicon Florist noted in October 2013 that Cloudability and Ellis had both recently received local recognition.[28]

Cloudability won several honors while he was chief executive. Cloudability won the judges’ choice award and the audience choice award in the cloud services category at the Under the Radar conference in April 2012. Ellis said Portland companies had won four of the five awards against a field of nearly 40.[29] The Technology Association of Oregon named Cloudability Startup of the Year at the 2013 Oregon Technology Awards, held in Portland that spring.[30] In October 2013 the workplace design firm turnstone and the Wharton School named Cloudability one of the 15 best young companies to work for. Cloudability was the only Portland company on the list.[28]

Podcasts that have interviewed him include SaaStr, The Venture Capital Fastlane and The Startup Haven Podcast.[9][2][31]

Personal life[edit]

Mat Ellis lives in Portland, Oregon.[25] He writes, cooks and, in his words, is raising “future adults”.[25] The Startup Haven Podcast introduced him as a former Brit with an extensive tea collection and a capable poker player.[31]

Ellis has held two volunteer roles in education. Ellis was president of the Old Brightonians, the Brighton College alumni association, from September 2020 to August 2024. Ellis was a trustee of Catlin Gabel School in Portland from September 2022 to August 2025.[10]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. "FAQ - Cloudy Portland". matellis.com. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  2. "Cloudy With A Chance of AI". The Venture Capital Fastlane. 15 November 2023. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  3. "Apptio, Inc. Announces Intent to Acquire Cloudability". Apptio. 16 May 2019. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  4. "Tech Moves: Cloudability CEO resigns after Apptio acquisition; Microsoft Philanthropies lands a new director; and more". GeekWire. 2 July 2019. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  5. "Apptio buys Cloudability as cloud cost-management market heats up". SiliconANGLE. 16 May 2019. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  6. "FasterBetter comes out of stealth as Sixty AI with $3.5 million Seed". Silicon Florist. 27 June 2023. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  7. "Tokematic: They solved the problem for cloud. Now Cloudability founders take on AI spend". Silicon Florist. 2 November 2026. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  8. "Press & Media - Cloudy Portland". matellis.com. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  9. "SaaStr Podcast #109: Mat Ellis, Founder & CEO @ Cloudability Discusses Scaling SaaS Teams with Startup Hyper-Growth". SaaStr. 4 April 2017. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  10. "Mat Ellis". LinkedIn. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  11. "Cloudability raises $8.7 million in venture backing, plans to grow Portland office". The Oregonian. 12 July 2012. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  12. "Cloudability Raises $8.7M To Put a Price Tag on Cloud Agility". SiliconANGLE. 12 July 2012. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  13. "Apptio buys Portland's Cloudability, adding more cloud financial analysis tools to its belt". GeekWire. 16 May 2019. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  14. "Cloudability Acquires Fellow Portland Startup, RipFog". Cloudability press release, PR Newswire. 29 July 2015. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  15. "Testimony provided to Joint Committee On Tax Reform by Mat Ellis of Cloudability". Oregon Legislative Information System. 13 June 2017. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  16. "Founder of Cloudability Joins the Board of Finout, Passing the Torch to the Next Generation of Cloud Cost Management". Finout press release, Business Wire. 16 November 2022. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  17. "About the FinOps Foundation". FinOps Foundation. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  18. "Cloudability seeks to broaden the cloud cost management discussion". TechTarget. 27 February 2019. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  19. "FinOps Foundation: New Trade Group Shares Cloud Cost-Optimization Best Practices". CRN. 26 February 2019. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  20. "Tokematic". Sixty AI. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  21. "Cloudability Founder Mat Ellis Opens Fractional Executive Practice for Pacific Northwest SaaS and AI Companies". Press release, ABNewswire via openPR. 21 April 2026. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  22. "Cloudy Ventures, formerly Sunny Ventures". Cloudy Ventures. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  23. "It's the Supply Chain, Stupid". Cloudy Portland. 17 April 2026. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  24. "The Cloud at Twenty: Old Habits Die Hard". Cloudy Portland. 26 April 2026. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  25. "Mat Ellis: Great companies are built together". matellis.com. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  26. "FinOps services aim to tackle cloud financial management". Network World. 1 March 2019. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  27. "Cloudability Helps Companies Hold Down the Costs of the Cloud (Bloomberg Businessweek)". Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, republishing Bloomberg Businessweek. 23 January 2017. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  28. "Another moment in the sun for Portland's Cloudability". Silicon Florist. 4 October 2013. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  29. "File under irony: Portland startups Cloudability and AppFog get noticed at Under the Radar". Silicon Florist. 27 April 2012. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  30. "Oregon Technology Awards names Cloudability "Startup of the Year"". Silicon Florist. 2 May 2013. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  31. "Inside the Founder Journey: A Conversation with Mat Ellis Founder of Sixty AI & Managing Partner of Sunny Ventures". The Startup Haven Podcast. 10 July 2024. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
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