Category Visionaries Nilo Rahmani, CEO & Co-Founder of Thoras AI: $6.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of AI-Powered Infrastructure Optimization
Thoras AI is pioneering a new category in infrastructure optimization, transforming how engineering teams manage workload efficiency through predictive scaling. Co-founded by twin sisters Nilo and her sibling who worked as reliability engineers for a decade, Thoras AI addresses the reactive nature of traditional infrastructure management. In this episode of Category Visionaries, we sat down with Nilo Rahmani, CEO and Co-Founder of Thoras AI, to learn about their journey from frustrated on-call engineers to building an AI-powered platform that helps reliability teams optimize performance while maintaining application integrity.
Topics Discussed:
- The unique dynamic of co-founding a company with your twin sister
- Thoras AI's approach to predictive scaling as a wedge into broader infrastructure automation
- The company's differentiation from pure finops/cost optimization tools by prioritizing reliability
- Building a premium brand identity that stands out in the crowded AI infrastructure space
- The evolution from customer discovery to product-market fit through organic outreach
- Creating a new category at the intersection of AI and infrastructure optimization
GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:
- Stop coding and start talking to customers first: Nilo's biggest breakthrough came when a Bay Area advisor told her to "stop coding and start talking." Instead of building an MVP in isolation, they spent months conducting customer discovery across the country. This approach revealed genuine pain points and validated demand before writing a single line of code. B2B founders should resist the engineer's instinct to build first and instead invest heavily in understanding customer problems through direct conversation.
- Validate demand through organic outreach, not friends and family: Thoras AI deliberately avoided selling to their network, choosing instead to validate their solution with complete strangers. Every customer has come through pure organic outreach, providing genuine validation that people truly need the solution rather than doing founders a favor. This approach builds confidence that the product solves real problems and creates a stronger foundation for scaling.
- Focus on reliability first, cost savings second: While many competitors position themselves as cost optimization tools, Thoras AI differentiated by prioritizing application reliability and integrity. As Nilo explains, "For the reliability engineer, any attention on us because of an outage is bad attention." This positioning resonates with their target buyers who view uptime as more critical than cost savings, creating a sustainable competitive advantage.
- Use premium branding to elevate your industry: Thoras AI intentionally created a consumer-grade brand aesthetic to stand out in the sea of generic B2B tools. Their approach makes reliability professionals "feel like they're elevating not only their role, but their entire team" by using a brand that understands their pain points without marketing fluff. B2B founders should consider how premium branding can differentiate their solution and make customers proud to use it.
- Build category definition around customer problems, not technology: Rather than leading with AI capabilities, Thoras AI positions itself around the specific problems reliability engineers face - automation, efficiency, and reducing manual fine-tuning. They're creating a category for "optimization and efficiency" rather than forcing their solution into existing categories like finops or observability. Founders should let customer problems define their category rather than starting with technology capabilities.
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