Vega Cloud, a Spokane-area tech startup that makes software to help companies manage their cloud spending, has been placed into the hands of a receiver after declaring it could no longer pay its debts.
Among those debts: nearly $830,000 owed to cloud giant Amazon Web Services.
Vega Cloud, founded in 2018 and based in Liberty Lake, Wash., had raised $12.2 million and reached about $7 million in annual revenue as of 2023, according to PitchBook data. It had also cracked the GeekWire 200 — ranking #181 in the most recent quarterly update of our Pacific Northwest startup index.
The company had less than $17,000 in the bank when it was placed into receivership Thursday, Jan. 15, in King County Superior Court in Seattle, the filing shows. It employed about 35 people as of earlier this month, down from about 65 two years ago, according to LinkedIn.
What brought Vega Cloud to this point isn’t clear. Responding to our email inquiry this weekend, co-founder and CEO Kris Bliesner confirmed that the company is going through a restructuring via receivership, and said he wished he could say more about the situation.
Receivership is a state-level process often used as an alternative to bankruptcy. In this case, Vega Cloud executed what’s known as an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, which puts a neutral party in charge of the company, pauses creditor collections, and places decisions about asset sales and payments under court supervision.
Sometimes those assets sell mostly intact, allowing new investors to give a business another try. But at this point, it’s not yet clear what will happen to the company’s employees or product.
Past ambitions for an IPO
In a March 2024 interview for GeekWire’s special series on Spokane, Bliesner described Vega Cloud’s trajectory in optimistic terms, saying the company was planning a $20 million to $30 million funding round and eyeing the public markets.
“We’re trying to push the envelope at Vega to maybe do the IPO route,” Bliesner said at the time. “We think that’s a viable thing for us.”
Vega Cloud operates in the sector known as FinOps, short for financial operations, helping companies get a handle on their cloud spending by bringing together finance and technical teams to track costs and avoid waste.
This is becoming more and more important as businesses pour money into cloud computing, often without realizing how much they’re spending on unused resources. Vega Cloud focused specifically on helping mid-sized companies manage spending across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, using automated tools to spot problems and recommend fixes.
In the tight-knit Spokane tech community, Vega Cloud has been seen as a startup with the potential to make it big. We took note of the company in 2022, when it raised $9 million.
Investor and entrepreneur Martin Tobias, a longtime fixture in Pacific Northwest enterprise tech, invested in Vega Cloud shortly after moving from Seattle to Spokane during the pandemic. He told us in early 2024 that it would probably be one of his most successful investments.
Tobias said Bliesner was exactly the kind of founder he looks for: someone with deep experience in a market who had tried to solve something one way, realized it wasn’t going to scale, and came up with a better solution.
“He took a new approach to an old problem,” Tobias said at the time.
Bliesner previously co-founded cloud migration startup 2nd Watch, which raised about $56 million before selling a majority interest to Singapore-based investor ST Telemedia.
Financial details from the filing
Vega Cloud’s court filings give an inside look at the privately held business.
First, the company had real customers and revenue. The filings list contracts with companies including Paramount, Hearst, Deloitte, Molina Healthcare, John Wiley & Sons, and Cal Poly, among others. It lists roughly $264,000 in accounts receivable.
The largest secured creditor is Sun Mountain Private Credit Fund I, owed $3.5 million. That debt is backed by Vega Cloud’s intellectual property — its software, patents, trademarks, and domain names. Any proceeds from a sale of those assets would go first to that lender.
In addition to the roughly $830,000 owed to AWS, the court records show convertible promissory notes totaling about $2.5 million that were issued to investors throughout 2025.
The records list current and former employees who are owed unpaid commissions, bonuses, and expense reimbursements, with some bonus obligations dating back to 2023. The company also owes payroll and withholding taxes to the IRS and multiple state tax agencies.
Bliesner is the largest shareholder at about 30%. Other significant investors include Album Ventures (10%), Cowles Company (3%), Rudeen & Company (3%), Kick-Start III and IV (combined 4%), Tacoma Venture Fund (1.5%), and Pitbull Ventures (1%).
The shareholder list also includes Voyager Capital, Alliance of Angels, Incisive Ventures, and Morning Star Foundation, along with dozens of individual investors.
Under court supervision, the receiver can now take possession of Vega Cloud’s assets and records, secure its bank accounts and data, evaluate and sell assets such as intellectual property, collect remaining receivables, and distribute proceeds to creditors in priority order.
The filings do not include a timeline for asset sales or any plan for the business to continue operating. Those details typically emerge later through receiver reports.
