Who Governs AI? CoreStack CEO Ez Natarajan Sits Down with Founder Thesis
CoreStack Founder and CEO, Ezhilarasan (Ez) Natarajan recently sat down to speak with Akshay Datt on The Founder Thesis Podcast to discuss CoreStack’s growth journey from a bootstrapped idea into a platform that governs more than $6 billion a year in cloud consumption. In this episode, Ez breaks down why governance matters more than ever as enterprises scale cloud and AI adoption.
Bootstrapping Through The Early Years
Founded in 2016, CoreStack is a governance platform that unifies cost, security, compliance, and operations for cloud, SaaS, and AI systems. In the podcast, Ez shares how investors once saw multi-cloud governance as a problem “not worth solving.” In the early years, CoreStack’s founders bootstrapped the company and built an initial product focused on easing cloud adopting. With CoreStack, customers can onboard cloud accounts across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle, identify and validate savings initiatives against a continuously maintained library of 3,000+ policies, and remediate configurations against a given cloud providers’ best-practice framework.
“When you bootstrap a company, you learn very quickly that ownership is how you show up every day, not just a title,” shares Ez. “That mindset shaped how we built CoreStack, and it’s why we’ve made a point of sharing that ownership with the people who built it alongside us. Today, more than 20% of CoreStack is owned by our employees. When the people building the product have a real stake in its success, they make decisions like owners, and our customers feel that.”
Expanding Governance to SaaS
As enterprise technology spend grew beyond cloud infrastructure, CoreStack made a deliberate bet that governance would no longer stop at the cloud boundary. SaaS spend is often spread across departments, bought outside central IT, and hard to tie back to actual usage. Organizations end up paying for unused licenses, overlapping tools, and renewals that no one reviews.
In March 2026, CoreStack announced its acquisition of BetterCloud, a SaaS management platform that helps organizations find the applications in use across their environment, optimize license spend, automate user lifecycle management, and protect sensitive data. The combined company now serves more than 2,000 customers and partners and governs more than $6 billion in cloud consumption and $35 billion in SaaS spend.
Bringing AI Into The Fold
The pattern that played out in cloud and SaaS is now repeating with AI, as enterprises adopt models and agents faster than they can account for the cost, access, and risk that come with them. CoreStack recently launched TokenOps, which helps FinOps, Engineering, IT, and Finance teams govern AI cost and usage from a single platform, so they can control which models and services their organization uses, attribute spend across the business, and prove that every AI investment is delivering value.
Tune In for More Insights
Listen to the full episode of The Founder Thesis Podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music, to hear more from Ez about how CoreStack grew from a bootstrapped startup into a governance platform for cloud, SaaS, and AI. He also discusses the strategic bets behind that growth and why he believes independent governance will define how enterprises adopt AI.
About The Founder Thesis Podcast
The Founder Thesis Podcast features candid conversations with founders on product-market fit, go-to-market strategy, and growth. Hosted by Akshay Datt, the podcast shares lessons from disruptive founders. Visit founderthesis.com to explore episodes.
