The Story of Customize: Building the Operating System for Cloud Cost Management

At age seven, Stoyan Zulyamski dreamed of building his own computer in Bulgaria, where getting one wasn’t easy. By fifteen, while working construction sites in Greece with his father, he had an epiphany that would later shape his entrepreneurial journey: “At that point I realized I really don’t want to do this. And I was good at studies.”

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Stoyan shared how this early determination led him to pursue a technical education and eventually build Customize, a platform transforming how enterprises manage their cloud costs. But the path wasn’t straightforward.

His first step into the tech world came at nineteen, joining Bulgaria’s largest bank. “I started working when I was 19 for the biggest bank in Bulgaria. And that gave me a lot of insight about how to construct my career going forward,” Stoyan explained. During his nine-year tenure, he managed a $40 million IT budget, developing a deep understanding of enterprise cost management challenges.

The spark for Customize came while working at a private equity fund in the United States. “That fund was buying companies each week between 550 and 500 million in terms of evaluation. And were migrating these companies into the different cloud providers,” Stoyan shared. During these migrations, he noticed a critical pattern: post-migration cloud costs were spiraling, and the management processes were entirely manual.

A particular migration project caught his attention. “There was a company which the fund bought about telecommunications, which was a very prominent player in the market, and it’s an excellent company. And they were migrating to AWS, but then decided to migrate to Google Cloud.” This transition highlighted the need for better cloud cost management tools.

The experience led to a crucial insight: “Cloud doesn’t tolerate spreadsheets. It tolerates something which can keep up.” This realization sparked the idea for Customize, but Stoyan took an unconventional approach to building the company.

Instead of pursuing venture capital, he partnered with Nevexis, a profitable services company he knew from his banking days. This decision was informed by his study of macroeconomics and anticipation of market cycles. “I didn’t want venture capital because I was studying at that point macroeconomics and I knew that there is a cycle coming of boom and bust,” he explained.

The company started with a focused approach on Google Cloud Platform before expanding to other providers. They’ve since evolved their positioning from a cost-saving tool to what Stoyan describes as an operating system for cloud optimization, reflecting the growing complexity of cloud environments with the addition of AI workloads.

Looking ahead, Stoyan envisions Customize becoming deeply integrated into enterprise cloud operations. “For me, I believe I want to have customized central place where it has connectivity to a lot of systems out there, and it can help you improve, whether it’s your AI model, whether it’s your current system in use, which can be monolithic or it can be, let’s say, microservice based, help you organize it in a better way.”

This vision aligns with what he sees as the future of software: “Bear in mind that the hyper automation era which we are getting into, we require from every software to act as a digital agent worker, which executes different tasks and can be leveraged as part of other larger ecosystem.”

In five years, Stoyan believes “the system will grow to such a stage where we will be able to help organization hyper automate their spendings and savings and efficiencies.” It’s an ambitious vision, but one that builds on Customize’s journey from spreadsheet replacement to becoming the operating system for cloud cost management.