US chip giant Nvidia Corp. has struck a deal to acquire Israeli deep learning developer Deci AI, "The Information" reports, according to a person involved in the deal. The report follows hard on the heels of yesterday's official announcement by Nvidia that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Israeli AI infrastructure orchestration and management company Run:ai, for an estimated $680 million.
Deci AI is one of three Israeli companies developing language models - the others being Amnon Shashua's AI21 Labs and Tabnine. Both Run:ai and Deci AI will help Nvidia's customers produce more from the GPUs and AI servers they lease or buy. While Run:ai improves the efficiency of each chip and allows a greater number of applications and workloads to be run on it, Deci "compresses" generative AI language models and allows them to work more efficiently on each Nvidia server.
"Globes" recently revealed that Microsoft had begun to integrate Dec AI into its cloud AI store Azure AI Studio, where Deci AI is competing not only with OpenAI but also with the open code of Meta and French company Mistral as well as Nvidia's models.
Deci AI was founded four years ago by CEO Dr. Yonatan Geifman, chief scientist Prof. Ran El-Yaniv from the Technion and a former senior Google researcher, and COO Jonathan Elial.
The company has raised $55 million to date from investors including Emerge and Insight Partners after the three founders sought to overcome the high costs of AI processing due to the expensive hardware required, while seeking a software solution that could accelerate AI use and allow more software developers to benefit from it. Nvidia, which holds a monopoly on servers and processors for AI, is estimated to have doubled the prices of its processors since the AI trend began about 18 months ago ago, long after Deci was founded, which has accelerated incentives to seek such a solution.
Deci AI produces estimated annual recurring revenue (ARR) of several million dollars and already has dozens of customers, including vehicle manufacturers, production and industrial machinery, retailers, cybersecurity companies, and in the healthcare and finance sectors. The company does not disclose names of customers, but claims that until now vehicles use its models to more quickly process received road images, and that a large chatbot manufacturer recently replaced the Mistral and Meta models with its models.
Before agreeing to be acquired by Nvidia, Deci was at a crossroads. It could have raised billions of dollars as its French rival Mistral did, and become a major supplier of language models and continue to compete with Google and Meta, or rather focus on the commercial side and sell as many models and as much software as possible to quickly develop its commercial muscle.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on April 25, 2024.
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