NVIDIA may be one of the most valuable companies in the world today, and much of that success can be attributed to M&A throughout the company’s history. Here we look at some of its Israeli acquisitions, ranging from tens of millions to billions of dollars. Let’s take a look at some of the Startup Nation companies that have caught the semiconductor giant’s eye.
Excelero Sector: Software-Defined Storage | Founded: 2014 | Founders: Yaniv Romem, Ofer Oshri, Lior Gal, Omri Mann | Price: $35M
NVIDIA announced that it will acquire Excelero, an Israeli startup developing high-performance software-defined storage. The acquisition price was not disclosed by either company, but is estimated to be around $35 million. Founded in 2014, Excelero has raised a similar amount since its inception, and investors will not receive any profit from the acquisition. All 30 employees of Excelero will join NVIDIA after the acquisition. Founded by Yaniv Romem, Ofer Oshri, Lior Gal, and Omri Mann, Excelero has been working with NVIDIA for years to RDMA-accelerate Excelero’s storage software. Excelero provides high-performance storage solutions to customers with artificial intelligence, machine learning, high-performance computing, database acceleration, and analytics workloads. Investors in the company include Battery Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Shlomo Kramer, Mickey Boodaei, Square Peg Capital, Mellanox, and Western Digital.
Deci Sector: AI | Founded: 2019 | Founders: Yonatan Geifman, Ran Elyaniv, Jonathan Erial | Price: $300 million
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) company Deci. The deal is valued at $300 million, according to estimates obtained by Calcalist. Deci’s last funding round in July 2022 valued it at an estimated $200 million. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close during the second quarter. Deci was founded in 2019 by Yonatan Geifman, Ran El-Yaniv, and Jonathan Elial. The company’s end-to-end deep learning development platform helps AI developers build, optimize, and deploy AI models to any environment, including cloud, edge, and mobile. Deci’s deep learning platform helps data scientists close the AI efficiency gap by adopting a more productive development paradigm. The platform enables AI developers to leverage hardware-enabled Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to rapidly build highly optimized deep learning models designed to meet specific production goals.
Run:AI Sector: AI | Founded: 2018 | Founders: Omri Geller and Dr. Ronen Dar | Price: $700 million
Nvidia has formally announced its intention to acquire Run:ai, an AI infrastructure orchestration and management platform. The transaction value was not disclosed but is estimated to be around $700 million. The acquisition of Run:ai marks Nvidia’s largest acquisition in Israel since its acquisition of Mellanox for $6.9 billion in March 2019, which was completed in 2020. Since the acquisition, Nvidia’s local Israeli R&D center, first established in 2016, has grown by approximately 100%, reaching 4,000 employees in the country. The Israeli R&D center is led by Amit Krig, SVP of Nvidia’s Software and NIC product lines.
Run:ai has developed an orchestration and virtualization software layer tailored to the unique needs of AI workloads running on GPUs and similar chipsets. Run:ai’s Kubernetes-based container platform for AI cloud efficiently pools and shares GPUs by automatically allocating the required amount of computing power, from a fraction of a GPU to multiple GPUs to multiple GPU nodes. Nvidia said that for the time being it will continue to offer Run:ai’s products under the same business model and will continue to invest in the Run:ai product roadmap as part of NVIDIA DGX Cloud, the leading cloud and co-developed AI platform for enterprise developers.
Mellanox Sector: Computer Networking | Founded: 1999 | Founder: Eyal Waldman | Price: $6.9 billion
In 2020, NVIDIA formally completed its acquisition of Israel-based chipmaker Mellanox Technologies for $6.9 billion. The deal, originally agreed to in March 2019, was delayed pending final approval by Chinese authorities. China is one of the major countries where both companies operate as a manufacturing base and target market for their business. NVIDIA opened a research and development center in Israel in 2017 and has since hired dozens of employees there. Mellanox makes interconnect chips for data centers used by suppliers of real-time online and cloud services, including Japanese messaging company LINE Corporation and Alibaba.
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