Our story
Twenty years ago a chief information officer described his job to us in a single image. Every budget cycle, the business squeezed his estate. Ten percent more for ten percent less, again, without dropping one service the company relied on. He said he felt like a magic orange, expected to give up more juice every year with nothing added back.
What he never had was a way to show where the juice went. The general ledger records what was paid and to whom. It does not record why a cost was incurred, what it produced or who consumed it, so there was nothing to build a bill of materials for a technology service from. Without one, every conversation about technology spend turned into an argument about a total.
Two disciplines grew up to fix that. IT financial management costed the technology a company owns. FinOps governed the cloud spend a company meters. They were built by different people, on different data, with a different vocabulary, and neither was built for the people who deliver the work, which is the largest line in real technology cost. The customer paid for those gaps. We built MagicOrange to close them.
AI has made the question harder. AI spend moves through seats, tokens, API calls and agents that keep running after the budget owner has stopped watching, and more of the money now sits with business units than with the CIO. The squeeze that used to be about surviving the budget is now about funding the future.
What we believe
In the age of AI, the organizations that do well will be the ones that can tell, while there is still time to act, which technology investments are creating value and which are quietly destroying it. The size of the budget matters less than that.
Every figure on the platform traces back to the record it came from, in both directions, so an executive can defend it in public. Plausible is not enough when a board is going to act on it.
A technology value figure that arrives once a year, assembled for a results briefing, confirms decisions that were already made. We think it should be live: the value technology creates, tracked against the cost of creating it, down to the service, the product and the initiative, on the day the decision is being made.
The organizations furthest along gave service owners, application owners and product owners responsibility for the economics of their own domain, instead of leaving a central finance team to carry all of it on everyone’s behalf.
The platform
MagicOrange converged IT financial management and FinOps into a single platform, because a system with a seam in the middle cannot produce a single number. Every technology cost sits on one governed model, whether the company consumes it on a meter, owns it or pays people to deliver it, including the cost of the people.
Can we see every dollar, with context?
What does one unit cost, and is it mine?
What is the full cost meant to be?
Where does the money for AI come from?
Are we holding the line?
What did the money return?
Today
36 enterprise clients
on four continents, with ten quantified outcomes already published.
Leader
A Leader in The Forrester Wave™: IT Financial Management Software, Q2 2026.
Premier Sponsor and Governing Board member
of the FinOps Foundation.
107 people
across the UK, South Africa, the US and Australia, with engineering and research and development in Durban.
The people
MagicOrange is led by people who held this budget before they built the tool for managing it. Five members of the team worked on the same technology cost program inside a global bank, from the chief executive to the cloud architect. The people who designed the data model and the cloud estate have done this work in production, at scale, for the kind of institutions MagicOrange now serves.
Today they also sit on the bodies that define how the work is done: a Governing Board seat at the FinOps Foundation, founding membership of the Tokenomics Foundation and membership of the TBM Council.
