Benjamin Thomas

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Sedai

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Benjamin Thomas, who publishes and speaks as Benji Thomas, is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Sedai, a Pleasanton, California company building what it describes as a self-driving cloud. Sedai’s platform uses machine learning to continuously right-size, tune and heal cloud workloads across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and on-premise environments, taking optimization actions autonomously rather than surfacing another dashboard of alerts. Thomas leads the company’s engineering organization and its core autonomous decision-making technology. The company exists because of a problem he and co-founder Suresh Mathew hit directly at PayPal: modern DevOps practice had made deployment fast and cheap, but the resulting explosion of microservices and infrastructure had outrun the ability of observability tooling and human operators to keep up, producing alert fatigue instead of prevention.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Sedai, leading engineering for its autonomous cloud management platform.
• Co-built, with Suresh Mathew at PayPal, the first autonomous system to optimize cloud resources across what was then among the world’s largest OpenStack deployments, handling millions of transactions per day.
• That system became, per Sedai’s own account, the only system PayPal trusted to make changes to production during peak hours – the credibility event that led to Sedai being founded.
• Served as Senior Manager for Cloud Computing at PayPal before co-founding Sedai.
• Helped grow Sedai past 100 employees, serving Fortune 500 enterprises, startups and government agencies.
• Sedai has raised roughly $39 million across three rounds, including a $15 million round led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from Sierra Ventures and Uncorrelated Ventures.

Professional Journey

Thomas spent the bulk of his early career in enterprise architecture and consulting, working as an Enterprise Solutions Architect at UST Global, an Integration Architect at Canoe Ventures, an Enterprise Architect at Optum within UnitedHealth Group, and a Manager in Advisory Services at PwC. That sequence put him repeatedly in the position of designing systems for large organizations whose infrastructure had grown faster than their ability to operate it.

He joined PayPal as a Senior Manager in Cloud Computing, where he worked alongside Suresh Mathew on the company’s OpenStack estate. PayPal at that point was running one of the largest private clouds in the world at extreme transaction volume, which made the cost of human-in-the-loop operations visible in a way it is not at smaller scale. Rather than build better alerting, the two built a system that acted on its own – autonomously adjusting cloud resources to hold performance and availability while cutting waste. The internal validation was unusually strong: the system earned enough trust to be permitted to make production changes during peak hours, a privilege normally withheld from automation entirely.

Thomas and Mathew left PayPal to commercialize that approach as Sedai, with Mathew as Founder and CEO and Thomas as Co-Founder and CTO. Sedai’s proposition is that autonomous operation, not better observability, is the answer to cloud complexity – the platform makes and applies optimization decisions for Kubernetes, serverless functions, virtual machines and databases without waiting for an engineer to read a chart. Thomas owns the technical side of that bet, running the engineering and machine-learning organization behind the product. Under the two founders the company has grown past 100 people and raised roughly $39 million, including a $15 million round led by Norwest Venture Partners and a further Series B in 2025.

Education

No education record could be established from any independent source. Sedai publishes none, and the degree claims that circulate on contact-data aggregator sites are resales of self-reported profile data rather than independent verification, so none is recorded here.