Rising AI unicorn Crusoe buys one-year-old Israeli startup Atero in $150M deal
The US AI infrastructure company is acquiring the GPU management firm in a cash-and-stock deal. 25 Atero employees will become the company’s development center in Israel.
Crusoe, an AI infrastructure provider, is acquiring the Israeli company Atero, which developed technology for the management and optimization of GPU processors for AI workloads. The companies have not disclosed the deal’s value, but it is estimated at around $150 million in cash and stock.
Atero currently employs 25 people, who will now join Crusoe and become the company’s R&D center in Israel. Atero was founded in July 2024 by Alon Yariv, CEO, and Omer Landau, CTO. Among the company’s private investors are Ofir Ehrlich and Assaf Rappaport. The acquisition will accelerate the development of Crusoe Cloud’s AI services and their performance, enabling its customers to harness the full potential of cutting-edge technologies.
Atero's technology enhances the usability, efficiency, and reliability of GPUs for the workloads generated in the use of artificial intelligence, such as running large language models. Atero raised $12 million in a previously undisclosed seed round.
The seed round was led by Primary Ventures with co-lead participation from lool Ventures, and joined by funds and private investors including: MVP Ventures, 91 VC, Operator Partners, DBot LP (founders of Descope and Demisto), Asaf Ezra, Amit Agarwal (Co-Founder of Datadog), Assaf Rappaport, IrregEx Ventures, Haleli Barath, Garuda Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Charlie Songhurst, Ronnie Zehavi (HiBob), Thomas Dohmke (CEO of GitHub), Nadir Izrael, Sharin and Yevgeny Dibrov, Julian Levy, Enrico Schiattarella, Mark Leslie and Fred Van Den Bosch (founders of Veritas), Ragu Raghuram (former CEO of VMware), John Donavan (former CEO of AT&T), Haleli Barath, Ofir Ehrlich (Eon), and Encoded Ventures.
Alon Yariv, CEO of Atero, commented: “When we founded Atero, we set out to transform the industry with our technology, and joining Crusoe is the fastest path to achieving that mission.”
“Atero's low-level expertise in high-performance computing infrastructure will be instrumental in Crusoe delivering unmatched performance, scale, reliability, and efficiency in our GPU clusters. By optimizing memory utilization, we can ensure our customers have their data in the right place at the right time to maximize GPU utilization rates and get more out of the money they spend on compute,” added Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO of Crusoe.
“By establishing our first Middle East office in Tel Aviv, we not only gain access to the incredible workforce across the region, but also the ability to better serve our global community of customers and partners”, said Crusoe.
