Nvidia announces $700 million acquisition of Run:ai | CTech

Nvidia has 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.

“Run:ai has been a close collaborator with NVIDIA since 2020 and we share a passion for helping our customers make the most of their infrastructure,” said Omri Geller, Run:ai co-founder and CEO. “We’re thrilled to join NVIDIA and look forward to continuing our journey together.”

The purchase of Run:ai is Nvidia’s biggest acquisition in Israel since purchasing 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. The Israeli R&D centers are headed by Amit Krig, SVP software and NIC Product line at Nvidia. In February 2022, Nvidia also announced the acquisition of the Tel-Aviv based startup Excelero, provider of high-performance software-defined storage.

Nvidia Israel includes dozens of product teams working on next-gen technologies in different fields: Networking, BlueField-DPU, CPU design and development, Autonomous Vehicles, AI-Based Cyber-Security, Video Streaming, AI & Machine Learning Research, and more.

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 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.

Nvidia’s market capitalization currently hovers around $2.1 trillion, making it the third most valuable company in the world after going from a valuation of $1 trillion to more than $2 trillion in just nine months.

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.

NVIDIA DGX and DGX Cloud customers will gain access to Run:ai’s capabilities for their AI workloads, particularly for large language model deployments. Run:ai’s solutions are already integrated with NVIDIA DGX, NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, NVIDIA Base Command, NGC containers, and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, among other products.