AI infrastructure company Nebius (Nasdaq: NBIS) announced today that it has acquired Israeli startup Inferize. Sources tell "Globes" that the acquisition is for between $100 million and $130 million. This is a particularly swift exit for a company that was founded just ten months ago and has now been sold even before launching its products commercially. The only investor in the company is the TLV Partners venture capital fund.
Inferize, cofounded by CEO Guy Bortnikov, has developed a technology designed to shorten the time needed to launch and scale large AI models, improve GPU utilization, and reduce computing costs. Nebius says Inferize succeeded in producing a working prototype within just three months of its inception. Now, the technology and its team will be integrated into Nebius’s "Token Factory" platform, which enables companies and developers to run AI models in a production environment. Inferize has 17 employees in its Tel Aviv office.
Inferize’s technology addresses a key operational challenge in the AI industry: the time elapsed between the allocation of computing resources to a model and the moment it is actually ready to handle user requests. This process, known as "cold start," requires loading the model into GPU memory. During this time, the allocated computing resources sit idle rather than processing requests. The issue is particularly significant when demand for AI services spikes, requiring the rapid deployment of additional servers, or when models are updated while in operation. To ensure availability in such scenarios, companies are forced to maintain excess computing capacity, specifically, GPUs that are not continuously utilized yet still incur costs.
Thus, the technology developed by Inferize is designed to reduce these wait times and enable faster alignment of computing resources with actual demand. For Nebius, this means the ability to handle a larger volume of requests using the same hardware infrastructure, improving the economic viability of generating tokens - the units of data that AI models process and produce. This acquisition follows other moves by Nebius to expand its AI model execution capabilities. Among other initiatives, the company integrated technology from Eigen AI, which focuses on optimization at the model, software component, and system levels into its Token Factory platform. Nebius also integrated the core team from Clarifai and licensed its technology, which is designed to enhance computing resource management and model execution processes.
"An extraordinary feat"
TLV Partners managing partner Shahar Tzafrir said, "Fortunately, 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. We knew their capabilities. Achieving an exit like this just months after the company's founding is an extraordinary feat, which demonstrates the strength and quality of the entrepreneurs and the excellent team they hired."
Bortnikov said, "Keeping spare GPUs running is the price of being ready for demand. Removing that cost is what we built Inferize to do, and Nebius is where it can go straight into the platform. Our team will work across the stack with one objective: serving more customer demand from every GPU."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 1, 2026.
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