Yuri Frayman

Yuri Frayman is co-founder and chief executive of Cast AI, a Miami, Florida, company whose software automatically tunes Kubernetes clusters and other cloud infrastructure to cut cost and keep applications stable. Born in Odesa, Ukraine, he co-founded the facial recognition company Viewdle, which Google bought in 2012, and the security company Zenedge, which Oracle bought in 2018.

From Odesa to Viewdle

As a child in the Soviet Union he moved with his family to Israel and then to the United States, according to an ICLUB profile. He trained in finance, switched to programming, and has been an entrepreneur since 1989. His first exit was LegalKey, legal compliance software, sold to Hummingbird. For Viewdle he recruited engineers in Ukraine with Professor Michail Schlesinger, and the company was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist before Google bought it. “This event put Ukraine in the spotlight and got a lot of locals involved in the industry,” he said.

From Zenedge to Cast AI

Frayman, Laurent Gil and Leon Kuperman started Cast AI in 2019 after watching cloud bills climb at Zenedge, according to Cota Capital. “If you look at your P&L, cloud costs are usually among the top five expense lines,” he told SoftBank Vision Fund. He argues that engineers size infrastructure for an application at one moment and the application keeps changing: “As you add more users, the application’s needs change, and staying on top of that is humanly impossible.”

He puts the people side first when he talks about startups. “The #1 reason why startups break up or succeed is related to human emotions,” he told Tesonet.