Professional Position and Role
Zhiming Shen is a Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Exostellar Inc., a company specializing in enterprise cloud spend optimization software. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University (2017). He is based in Sunnyvale, California, with company offices also in Ithaca, New York, and Santa Clara, California.
Academic and Research Background
Dr. Shen completed his doctoral research under the guidance of Cornell faculty members Hakim Weatherspoon and Robbert van Renesse, both also co-founders of Exostellar. His research interests focus on operating systems, distributed systems, cloud computing, and virtualization. He contributed to various significant systems and technologies including CloudScale, which won the prestigious ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) 10-year Best Paper Award in 2020.
He has several acclaimed publications in top-tier conferences such as ASPLOS, SOCC, Middleware, and ICDCS, and holds multiple patents related to cloud computing technologies, including:
- Enterprise Cloud Garbage Collector (US Patent Application No. 15/006,571, 2016)
- Virtual Machine Image Access De-duplication (US Patent No. 8,897,573, 2014)
His research contributions center on enhancing cloud infrastructure performance, elastic resource scaling, and optimizing cloud-native container management, evidenced by projects like X-Containers, Xen-Blanket, and Supercloud.
Professional Achievements and Recognitions
- IBM Ph.D. Fellowship (2015-2016)
- IBM First Patent Application Invention Achievement Award (2012)
- Best Paper Award at the 32nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (2012)
- Recognized for contributions leading to the 10-year Best Paper Award at ACM SoCC (2020)
Industry Engagement and Impact
At Exostellar, Dr. Shen leads the technology strategy and development of a platform that dynamically allocates and optimizes cloud workloads, primarily targeting spot instance pricing optimization on AWS. Exostellar’s software delivers significant cost savings by minimizing cloud infrastructure waste, consolidating resources, and balancing workload shifts between spot and on-demand cloud instances without long-term financial commitments.
The company’s proprietary technology allows clients to increase infrastructure utilization efficiently, reducing time to market and financial overhead. Exostellar’s clients include Astera Labs, Synopsys, and U.S. Department of Energy laboratories such as Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory.
Company Funding and Market Position
- Exostellar has raised over $20 million in funding, including a $15 million Series A round in September 2023, led by Celesta Capital Partners, Cambium Capital, and Alpha Intelligence Capital.
- The company’s valuation after the Series A round was approximately $40 million.
- Exostellar operates in the growing cloud financial operations (FinOps) market, projected to reach $2.75 billion by 2028.
- The platform currently supports AWS compute instances (CPU-based) with plans to expand to other cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud, and to support GPU instances.
- Competitors include NetApp-owned Spot.io, Cast AI, VMware’s CloudHealth, Apptio, nOps, and Zesty.
Recent Company Activities and Strategic Initiatives
- In April 2025, Exostellar publicly highlighted a case study with Arm, demonstrating the platform's utility in running complex Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workloads on AWS efficiently.
- Leadership expansion efforts in early 2025 included strengthening the team with the addition of a new Chief Revenue Officer.
- The company actively develops AI-driven infrastructure optimization technologies, aligning with growing cloud workload demands fueled by AI and high-performance computing trends.
Contact and Online Presence
- LinkedIn: [Zhiming Shen](http://www.linkedin.com/in/zhiming-shen-77118945)
- Personal Website: [zhimingshen.com](https://zhimingshen.com/)
- Professional Email Contact (publicly available from academic profile): zshen@cs.cornell.edu
This profile reflects Dr. Shen’s combination of strong academic credentials, extensive research accomplishments, proven patent portfolio, and significant leadership in a technology-driven startup addressing practical cloud cost optimization challenges for enterprise customers. His role as CTO underpins Exostellar’s position in a competitive and rapidly growing market segment, driving both product innovation and strategic partnerships with leading industry players.
