CAST AI
CAST AI is a Lithuanian startup that optimises cloud costs for companies using Kubernetes. The "cloud cost optimization" market might seem like a niche — but the team built TAM/SAM/SOM with a very specific bottom-up approach.
The starting point was not "cloud management market" (generic billions) — it was a measurable metric: analyses from Gartner and AWS themselves showed that companies wasted an average of 32% of their cloud budget on unused or over-provisioned resources. With global enterprise cloud spending exceeding $500 billion per year, the "waste" market was quantifiable: $160 billion annually in recoverable spend.
CAST AI's SAM was the subset of this market where the problem was automatable: companies using containers on Kubernetes, the dominant orchestration system. A segment representing approximately 40% of enterprise cloud spend.
The initial SOM was even more specific: mid-size tech companies (50-500 engineers) with monthly cloud spend between $50K and $500K — large enough to feel the pain of waste, small enough to make decisions quickly without 18 months of procurement.
This bottom-up approach made CAST AI's TAM/SAM/SOM credible because every number had a verifiable source.
Bottom-up TAM starts from a measurable data point (how much companies waste, how many hours they lose, what they pay the competitor) and arrives at the total market by calculation, not assumption.