Neither the war waged for more than six months with Hamas or Hezbollah, nor the missile and drone attack launched on April 13 by Iran, will have calmed the ardor of Nvidia in Israel. The information that leaked a few weeks ago has therefore materialized: the American GPU giant announced, Wednesday April 24, the acquisition of Run:ai, a Tel Aviv start-up whose software helps developers and businesses to manage complex AI workloads and IT resources on a single platform.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the value would be between $600 million and $700 million, according to reports in the Israeli press. This is Nvidia's largest acquisition made in the Hebrew state since it acquired Mellanox Technologies in 2020, for $6.9 billion, thus confirming a strategic presence in this ecosystem.
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According to The Information, Nvidia has even already set its sights on another nugget from Silicon Wadi, with “advanced negotiations” to acquire the Israeli start-up Deci. This deep learning platform that helps AI developers build, optimize and deploy AI models in any environment (cloud, edge, mobile), has raised over $50 million primarily from American investor Insight Partners.
Commenting on the acquisition of Run:ai, Alexis Bjorlin, vice-president of DGX Cloud at Nvidia, indicated that the acquisition of this start-up, with which the Santa-Clara group had been collaborating since 2020, could help “customers to use their AI computing resources more efficiently”. “Customer AI deployments are becoming increasingly complex, with workloads distributed across cloud, edge and on-premises data center infrastructure,” the executive said on the group’s blog. And Run: ai enables enterprise customers to manage and optimize their IT infrastructure, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments.”
Run:ai was founded in 2018 by Omri Geller, CEO, and Ronen Dar, CTO, two graduates of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Tel Aviv University who, under the leadership of Professor Meir Feder, worked together to build a foundational layer for running any AI workload. The startup has since developed a single, unified platform to simplify AI infrastructure and workload management, while meeting the growing needs of generative AI and large language models. To date, the startup has raised $118 million from investors including Tiger Global Management and Insight Partners, as well as TLV Partners and S Capital VC.
One thing is certain, with this acquisition, Nvidia reaffirms its appetite for the Israeli ecosystem as well as its desire to grow in the Hebrew state, where Intel was established in the 1970s, before the two groups competed in the Generative AI. Anxious to catch up in artificial intelligence, the historic microprocessor juggernaut has recently distinguished itself with its Gaudi accelerators, chips specialized in AI recovered thanks to the acquisition of the Israeli Habana Labs.
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But Nvidia has put the turbo on. Between launching its first operations in the country in 2016, and opening an AI research center two years later, its R&D activities in Israel are already the company's largest outside of UNITED STATES. The chipmaker employs around 4,000 people there in seven R&D centers, including Yokne'am, Mellanox headquarters, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ra'anana and Beersheba in the south, which Run:ai employees are expected to join .
The group also manages the Nvidia Inception Program for Startups, an accelerator that works with hundreds of young startups including a thousand Israeli startups, and the Nvidia Developer Program, which allows developers to access its offerings for free. In March 2022, it had acquired Israeli company Excelero, a provider of enterprise data storage solutions for $35 million.
Finally, almost a year ago, Nvidia made headlines by announcing the development and construction of the country's most powerful generative AI cloud supercomputer, called Israel-1, based on a new Ethernet platform developed locally. A project that the terrorist attacks of October 7, followed by military operations in Gaza – which mobilized nearly 360,000 reservists, many of them recruits from tech – have not called into question either.
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