When Ron Nelson started his own consulting practice in 2023, he did so with 20 years of experience in the startup world under his belt. He had most notably worked as a sales manager for iContact and as the Vice President of Sales for Kevel, which he helped reach its Series B.
“I had a pretty good playbook in my hands to be able to help founders get past that founder sales commotion,” Nelson said.
Alan Cox, meanwhile, was previously the Vice President of Software Engineering at GeoForce, where he helped reduce cloud operating expenses by around $250,000. He first crossed paths with Nelson when both were working at iContact, and the two would stay in touch. In time, their careers exposed them to a disconnect beyond sales and engineering: the disadvantage of hefty SaaS cloud costs.
“We [saw] that SaaS companies that have reached the $30-40 million mark in revenue are spending anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 per month in the cloud,” Nelson said.
He went on to note that the total spend was around $250 million, and some 27% of it was being wasted because there wasn’t an efficient way for companies to track data on the causes. This issue keeps non-technical executives from making the right decisions on where they should and shouldn’t optimize spending. The trend is what Nelson calls a “black box.”
“They can’t control it,” he said. “And perhaps most painfully, nobody actually owns it—cloud costs fall through the cracks between engineering, finance, and business.”
In late 2024, Cox met with Nelson to help with a GTM strategy for a potential solution to the issue and they began conducting market research. By the end of 2025, their efforts led them to launch Beakpoint—their own startup built to optimize copmanies’ cloud spend by accessing granular data to pinpoint the drivers of high cloud costs.
How it works—and who it’s for
Beakpoint provides a detection system that indicates key factors for higher cloud expenses and serves to replace the traditional approach of an engineering team manually doing the same. That standard approach, during which engineers may have to select every server call individually, can take up to a year to finish.
The startup is primarily targeting SaaS companies, wherein there is often specific but unaddressed frustration with high cloud costs. Beakpoint’s total addressable market amounts to $55 billion, but they are focused on a smaller beachhead market of $350 million.
The process is quite simple. Once a user creates an account on the Beakpoint platform, they insert an API call—which is an endpoint for server calls. Then, they can tag it to specific parameters they would like to track (such as customer ID, product ID, etc.).
Beakpoint then starts collecting that data via open telemetry, which sends traces of the data to the system and ingests it granularly. Thereafter, Beakpoint can map every bit of data coming into the server call and allocate what customers and products a company’s spending is going toward. The process only takes up to an hour.
Part of Beakpoint’s mission is to show non-technical company executives that you can figure out what a business outcome is via cloud spend. Nelson considers their system to be a “mediation layer” between the business and finance teams where gaps in investment decisions often exist.
The testing phase was an “arduous” process according to Nelson, and he noted that their biggest challenge has been focusing the right message for the correct ideal-customer-profile. However, they’ve already begun to overcome that challenge since emerging from stealth in 2025; Beakpoint processed 600 million cost calculations in March, and the numbers have been quickly scaling.
“It has gotten us to our first couple of contracts and is leading to early revenue,” Nelson said.
Cost for utilizing Beakpoint is usage-based, and if a user wants additional optimizations, the Beakpoint sales team will help calculate the costs.
Building Beakpoint so far
From the start, Cox and Nelson raised money in SAFEs to fund their operations. Recently, they have started raising for a pre-seed round.
Beakpoint has been involved in the Winston Starts program in Winston Salem as well as the Launch Powered by KPMG accelerator in Chapel Hill.
Beakpoint’s current marketing strategy involves producing content as well as reaching out to founders in the co-founders’ networks. The two have also been active on social media to help drive awareness of their solution.
QUICK BITS
Startup: Beakpoint
Co-Founders: Alan Cox (CEO), Ron Nelson (CRO)
Founded: 2025
Team size: 2
Location: Winston-Salem
Website: beakpoint.io
Funding: Raising pre-seed
As for what’s next, the biggest changes the founders have recently begun to incorporate include the ability to track customer profitability within the dashboard and to ingest revenue data on a per-customer basis. They also anticipate adding an AI copilot for customer support.
Nelson noted that if there’s anything he wishes founders realized more readily, it’s that understanding unit economics at the customer and feature level is important so they can “price with confidence” and “make real business decisions instead of guessing.”
“And we’re making that possible in minutes, not months,” he says.
