Nvidia's biggest acquisitions of Israeli startups

NVIDIA may be among the world’s most valuable companies today - and much of that success can be down to its M&As throughout its history. Here, we have highlighted some of its Israeli acquisitions that range from tens of millions to billions. Let’s take a look at some of Startup Nation that caught the eyes of the chip giant.

Excelero
Sector: Software-defined Storage | Established: 2014 | Founders: Yaniv Romem, Ofer Oshri, Lior Gal and Omri Mann | Price: $35 million

NVIDIA announced that it is acquiring Israeli startup Excelero, which develops high-performance software-defined storage. The cost of the deal wasn’t revealed by the companies, but is estimated to be around only $35 million. Excelero, which was founded in 2014, has raised a similar sum since its inception, meaning the acquisition isn’t set to generate a profit for investors. Excelero’s 30 employees are all set to join NVIDIA following the acquisition. Excelero, founded by Yaniv Romem, Ofer Oshri, Lior Gal and Omri Mann, has collaborated with NVIDIA for years on accelerating Excelero’s storage software with RDMA. Excelero provides high-performance storage solutions for 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, Western Digital, and more.

Deci
Sector: AI | Established: 2019 | Founders: Yonatan Geifman, Ran El-Yaniv, and Jonathan Elial | Price: $300 million

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 was subject to regulatory approvals and expected to close during the second quarter. Deci was founded in 2019 by Yonatan Geifman, Ran El-Yaniv, and Jonathan Elial. Its 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. 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.

Run:AI
Sector: AI | Established: 2018 | Founders: Omri Geller and Dr. Ronen Dar | Price: $700 million

Nvidia officially announced its intent to acquire AI infrastructure orchestration and management platform Run:ai. The value of the deal was not revealed, but is estimated at around $700 million. The purchase of Run:ai is Nvidia’s biggest acquisition in Israel since purchasing Mellanox for $6.9 billion in March 2019, completed in 2020. 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. The Israeli R&D centers are headed by Amit Krig, SVP software and NIC Product line at Nvidia.

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 clouds efficiently pools and shares GPUs by automatically assigning the necessary amount of computing power – from fractions of GPUs, to multiple GPUs, to multiple nodes of GPUs. Nvidia said it will continue to offer Run:ai’s products under the same business model for the immediate future and that it will continue to invest in the Run:ai product roadmap as part of NVIDIA DGX Cloud, an AI platform co-engineered with leading clouds for enterprise developers.

Mellanox
Sector: Computer networking | Established: 1999 | Founder: Eyal Waldman | Price: $6.9 billion

In 2020, Nvidia officially completed the purchase of Israel-based chipmaker Mellanox Technologies Ltd. in a deal valued at $6.9 billion. The deal, originally agreed on in March 2019, had been delayed until the Chinese authorities finally signed off on it. China is one of the major countries in which the two companies operate, both as their base of manufacturing and as a target market for operations. Nvidia employs several dozen people in Israel after opening a research and development center in the country in 2017. Mellanox manufactures interconnect chips for data centers, used by suppliers of real-time online services, and cloud services, including Japanese messaging company LINE Corporation and Alibaba.

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