OpenMetal, a Virginia Beach, Virginia provider of private cloud, bare metal and GPU infrastructure, said on September 30, 2026 that it had acquired Economize, a cloud cost management platform used by engineering, finance and FinOps teams. Terms were not disclosed.
The deal also launched OpenMetal Labs, a new service that designs and builds custom infrastructure and cost solutions for customers whose problems standard products do not cover. Customers of either company can now buy both companies' products through one relationship, OpenMetal said.
Economize co-founder and chief executive Anirudh Murali and his team are joining OpenMetal. The company did not say how many people work at Economize.
What Economize built
Economize tracks and analyses spending on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, as well as on AI model providers OpenAI and Anthropic. The software combines cost reporting, anomaly detection and recommendations for cutting waste, and connects to customer accounts without installing agents, through billing exports and integrations such as AWS CloudFormation.
According to its website, the company was started in February 2021 by founders with experience at Gojek, now part of GoTo, and Zoho. OpenMetal said Murali and co-founder Amrish built the platform to give teams detailed visibility into where their cloud money goes. Economize's site lists case studies with customers including Apna, Hasura and Amplemarket.
Economize also built a migration estimator that matches workloads to equivalent offerings across cloud providers. OpenMetal said its own infrastructure is now included in those comparisons, so users can see what a workload would cost on private cloud before committing.
“Companies running infrastructure-heavy businesses have needed a FinOps tool and an infrastructure vendor that understands their cost structure, and rarely got both from the same place.”
Why OpenMetal is buying
OpenMetal's case is that companies with heavy, steady workloads often overpay on public cloud and lack both a cost tool and an infrastructure vendor that understands their spending. Economize shows where the money goes; OpenMetal offers somewhere else to run the workloads when private infrastructure makes more sense.
“Companies running infrastructure-heavy businesses have needed a FinOps tool and an infrastructure vendor that understands their cost structure, and rarely got both from the same place,” said Todd Robinson, OpenMetal's co-founder and president.
Murali said Economize had set out to make public cloud spending transparent, and that with OpenMetal it could help customers act on that data by choosing the right mix of public and private cloud.
How the deal came together
In a blog post about the acquisition, Robinson wrote that he and Murali met by chance at a conference years ago, when a scheduled meeting shifted, and realised they were working on two halves of the same problem.
Robinson also pointed to a staffing benefit: many OpenMetal customers have large engineering teams in India, and the Economize team allows the company to offer support across time zones, with its engineers speaking directly to customers' engineers during their working hours.
Economize's data, he wrote, showed that compute, block storage and egress make up the largest share of customers' cloud bills, followed by object storage and managed databases, which helped OpenMetal decide where to focus.
What happens to customers
Customers who decide to move workloads to private infrastructure will be helped through the transition by OpenMetal, while those running a mix of public and private cloud will get continued monitoring and optimisation across both, the company said.
Both companies had already done custom work of this kind before the deal. OpenMetal said it had built a Ceph storage cluster tuned for a hosting provider whose workload standard configurations could not handle, while Economize had built advanced custom reporting and alerts for an engineering team that needed more than its standard platform offered. Robinson wrote that Labs could also build white-labelled cost dashboards and Slack or Teams agents that flag changes in spending.
OpenMetal Labs becomes OpenMetal's fifth product line, alongside hosted private cloud, bare metal dedicated servers, GPU servers and clusters, and Ceph storage clusters. For its largest customers, OpenMetal said, Economize will let them adapt its cost management codebase to their own workloads and data flows.
