Nvidia to acquire AI startup Deci for $300 million
The chip giant has spent $1 billion purchasing two Israeli startups in one week after announcing a deal to buy Run:ai for $700 million last week
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) company Deci. According to estimates obtained by Calcalist, the value of the deal is $300 million. In Deci's last fundraising round in July 2022, it was valued at an estimated $200 million. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to close during the second quarter.
Nvidia confirmed the deal to Calcalist, stating that "NVIDIA’s expertise in AI will be complemented by Deci’s capabilities in NAS, which automates the design of deep learning models to improve performance. Deci’s engineering team has knowledge in NAS, Foundational Models, Inference and in developing complex algorithms."
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With this acquisition, Nvidia concludes the purchase of two Israeli AI companies in one week, totaling a value of $1 billion. This comes after it announced the purchase of Run:ai last Wednesday in a deal worth $700 million.
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.
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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.
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 in March 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.
