Nvidia Negotiating Run:ai Purchase in Major Transaction

Founded in 2018, this Israeli startup has crafted a specialized orchestration and virtualization software layer designed specifically for the demands of AI workloads on GPUs and akin chipsets. The deal’s worth is projected to be in the range of several hundred million dollars, potentially even soaring up to $1 billion.

Nvidia is in advanced negotiations to acquire AI infrastructure orchestration and management platform Run:ai, Calcalist has learned.

The value of the deal is estimated at many hundreds of millions of dollars and could even reach $1 billion. The companies did not respond to Calcalist’s request for comment.

Run:ai raised $75 million in a Series C round in March 2022 led by Tiger Global Management and Insight Partners, who also led the previous Series B round. The round included the participation of additional existing investors, TLV Partners, and S Capital VC, bringing the total funding raised to date to $118 million.

Run:ai was founded in 2018 by Omri Geller (CEO) and Dr. Ronen Dar (CTO). The two met during the course of their studies at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering. Dar used to be a researcher at Bell Labs and an algorithm engineer at Anobit Technologies, and later at Apple after it acquired the company. Until founding Run:ai, Geller worked at the Prime Minister’s Office Technological Unit.

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.

“We are the leading company in our sector and it is important to us to establish ourselves as a big company that is building the AI operating system. We have been selling our product for only a year and a half and we already have millions of dollars in revenue,” Geller told Calcalist two years ago.

Should the deal be completed, it would be Nvidia’s first acquisition in Israel since purchasing Mellanox for $6.9 billion in March 2019.

Nvidia, which opens its annual GTC conference on Monday, has surged to become the world’s third-most-valuable company over the past year, as investors cannot get enough of the semiconductor maker whose chips power popular artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT.

An AI-induced jaw-dropping rally in Nvidia shares has taken the company’s valuation from $1 trillion to more than $2 trillion in just nine months, overtaking Amazon.com, Google-parent Alphabet, and Saudi Aramco.

Nvidia’s market capitalization currently hovers around $2.2 trillion. The relentless rise in shares of Nvidia, which controls 80% of the high-end AI chip market, has been instrumental in pushing Wall Street to record levels this year, while giving the company a more than 5% weightage on the benchmark S&P 500 index.

Source : CalcalisTech