Nvidia completed its acquisition of Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) company Deci in recent days. According to estimates obtained by Calcalist, the deal value is $300 million. Deci’s previous funding round valued it at an estimated $200 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 their AI models to any environment, including cloud, edge, and mobile.
The acquisition of Run:ai marks Nvidia’s largest acquisition in Israel since acquiring Mellanox in March 2019 for $6.9 billion. Since the acquisition, Nvidia’s local R&D center in Israel, first established in 2016, has grown by nearly 100%, bringing the number of employees to his 4,000. Country. Nvidia also announced that it will acquire Excelero, a Tel Aviv-based startup that provides high-performance software-defined storage, in February 2022.
In July 2022, Deci raised $25 million in a Series B funding round led by global software investor Insight Partners, in addition to existing investors Square Peg, Emerge, Jibe Ventures, and Fort Ross Ventures. Investor ICON also participated. The investment comes just seven months after Deci secured his $21 million in Series A funding, also led by Insight Partners, bringing Deci’s total funding to his $55.1 million.
Deci’s deep learning platform helps data scientists close the AI ​​efficiency gap by adopting more productive development paradigms. The platform allows AI developers to leverage hardware-enabled Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to quickly build highly optimized deep learning models designed to meet specific production goals. Masu.
The Israeli startup announced in March the launch of a Generative AI platform designed to meet the efficiency and privacy needs of enterprises. Deci’s Gen AI platform features a unique set of fine-tunable large-scale language models (LLMs), inference engines, and AI inference cluster management solutions.
