Nebius buys 10-month-old Israeli startup Inferize for up to $130M
What's the deal? AI infrastructure company NebiusDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → (Nasdaq: NBIS) has acquired Israeli startup InferizeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, sources tell Globes , for between $100 million and $130 million. The deal marks a swift exit for Inferize, founded just 10 months ago and sold before launching its products commercially.
What does Inferize do? Cofounded by chief executive officer Guy Bortnikov and chief technology officer Lior Gorbonos, the startup has developed technology to shorten the time needed to launch and scale large AI models, improve GPU utilisation, and cut computing costs — work Bortnikov says can cut AI model loading times from tens of minutes to seconds. Both founders were previously on the founding team at Granulate, an infrastructure-optimisation company Intel acquired in 2022. Inferize has 17 employees in Tel Aviv and produced a working prototype within three months of its inception.
The technical angle: Inferize tackles the "cold start" problem — the lag between allocating computing resources to a model and the moment it can handle requests. During this time, GPUs sit idle while still incurring costs. To stay available during demand spikes, companies maintain excess capacity.
What's the endgame? Inferize's team and technology will be integrated into Nebius's Token Factory platform, which lets companies run AI models in production. For Nebius, the deal means handling more requests on the same hardware, improving the economics of generating tokens — the units of data AI models process.
Why now? The acquisition follows other Nebius moves to expand its model execution capabilities. It integrated technology from Eigen AIDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, which focuses on optimisation across model, software, and system levels, and licensed technology from Clarifai, whose core team it also brought on.
The signal: TLV Partners, Inferize's sole investor, led US$6.47M seed round that stayed undisclosed until Bortnikov revealed it in a LinkedIn post after the deal closed. TLV managing partner Shahar Tzafrir said the firm's earlier seed bet on Granulate made the relationship an easy repeat: "We were already familiar with the team, and they with us, thanks to our seed investment in Granulate, which is why they chose us as their seed investors." A sole backer funding a startup to a nine-figure exit before it ever shipped a product underscores how aggressively AI infrastructure players are buying talent and technology to squeeze more output from scarce GPU capacity.
Read more: en.globes.co.il · calcalistech.com
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
