Nvidia continues Israel shopping spree with acquisition of Deci
After completing the $700 million purchase of Run:ai, the chip giant is set to soon announce the acquisition of Israeli AI startup Deci
Nvidia is on the verge of completing another significant acquisition of an Israeli software company in the field of artificial intelligence. According to The Information, the chip giant is in advanced negotiations to acquire the Israeli startup Deci. The valuation of the purchase was not disclosed, but it is estimated to be lower than the amount Nvidia paid for the acquisition of Run:ai, which was announced on Wednesday and is estimated at about $700 million.
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Deci was founded in 2019 by Yonatan Geifman, Ran El-Yaniv, and Jonathan Elial. Deci’s end-to-end deep learning development platform helps AI developers build, optimize, and deploy AI models to any environment such as cloud, edge, and mobile.
The purchase of Run:ai was Nvidia’s biggest acquisition in Israel since buying Mellanox for $6.9 billion in March 2019. Since the acquisition, Nvidia’s local R&D center in Israel, which was first established in 2016, grew by about 100%, reaching 4,000 employees in the country. Nvidia also announced the acquisition of the Tel-Aviv based startup Excelero, provider of high-performance software-defined storage, in February 2022.
Deci raised $25 million in a Series B funding round in July 2022 led by global software investor Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Square Peg, Emerge, Jibe Ventures, and Fort Ross Ventures, as well as new investor ICON. The investment came just seven months after Deci secured $21 million in Series A funding, also led by Insight Partners, bringing Deci’s total funding to $55.1 million.
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Deci’s deep learning platform helps data scientists eliminate the AI efficiency gap by adopting a more productive development paradigm. With the platform, AI developers can leverage hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to quickly build highly optimized deep learning models that are designed to meet specific production goals.
The Israeli startup announced the launch of its Generative AI platform last month designed to meet the efficiency and privacy needs of enterprises. Deci’s Gen AI platform features a series of proprietary, fine-tunable large language models (LLMs), an inference engine, and an AI inference cluster management solution.
