Khawaja Shams, co-founder and CEO of Momento, is focused on powering interactive applications with efficient caching services. With a background that includes working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Amazon Web Services, Shams has a mission to improve how developers utilize caching services. Momento recently raised a $15 million round led by Bain Capital Ventures, showcasing the potential of their approach to cloud caching. In a recent episode of the Startup Project podcast, Shams shared insights into Momento’s origins and his experiences as a first-time founder.
Shams’ journey to cloud entrepreneurship began at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on image processing for Mars rovers and later discovered Amazon Web Services (AWS). His experience with AWS and identifying pain points in existing caching solutions while at Amazon led him to create Momento. The company aims to simplify caching for developers by handling scalability and optimization behind the scenes, allowing developers to focus on building their applications rather than managing infrastructure.
Initially, Momento struggled with a broad market approach, trying to target every industry as if caching was a ubiquitous need. However, they have since refined their focus to industries with unpredictable workloads where outages have significant financial impacts, such as media, entertainment, gaming, and fintech. Momento’s customer-centric approach, inspired by Shams’ time at Amazon, involves finding design partners to collaborate on solving real-world caching challenges at scale.
Looking ahead, Shams sees opportunities in supporting the infrastructure needs of AI applications, as more interactive and data-driven applications emerge. Momento aims to provide fast, real-time data access to enable the next generation of AI-driven applications. Shams emphasizes the critical importance of focus for early-stage startups, advising founders to identify key goals and align their team around those objectives. He also stresses the need for a customer-centric culture, tailored to Momento’s unique needs and goals.
Overall, Momento’s core value proposition revolves around simplicity, offering a single SaaS endpoint that handles multiple components of a typical caching architecture. By collapsing these components and handling scaling and optimization behind the scenes, Momento allows developers to focus on their applications rather than infrastructure management. Shams’ journey from NASA to Momento showcases the evolution of his career and the lessons he has learned as a first-time founder, emphasizing the importance of focus, customer obsession, and collaboration in building a successful startup in the cloud computing industry.
