Nebius Acquires Israeli AI Startup Inferize for Up to $150 Million

Nebius, an AI cloud company traded on the Nasdaq, has acquired the Israeli startup Inferize, founded in early 2026. While the exact purchase price was not disclosed, it is estimated to be between $100 million and $150 million, including employee retention bonuses. Inferize, which has 17 employees based in Tel Aviv, specializes in optimizing inference for artificial intelligence models. Their technology aims to reduce the time and cost associated with loading large models and making workloads elastic, addressing the issue of "cold starts" where GPUs remain idle during model startup or demand spikes.

The acquisition integrates Inferize's team and technology into Nebius Token Factory, Nebius's managed inference platform. This move is expected to enhance Nebius's ability to minimize "GPU tax," align capacity with actual demand, and improve infrastructure utilization and cost savings. Inferize's founders, Guy Bortnikov (CEO) and Lior Gurbonus (CTO), were part of the founding team at Granulate.

This acquisition follows Nebius's previous strategic moves to upgrade its platform, including acquiring Eigen AI and Clarifai. The Inferize team will work within Nebius to maximize the output from each GPU for their customer network. The rapid exit, just eight months after the company's founding, has been highlighted as an exceptional achievement by early investors.

Nebius has been active in the Israeli market, notably acquiring Tavily for an initial $275 million, potentially reaching $400 million. Tavily developed a dynamic, real-time search and information layer for AI agents. Nebius also explored acquiring AI21, though those talks did not result in a full acquisition, leading AI21 to pivot its strategy. Additionally, Nebius is establishing a large-scale AI data center in Modi'in, selected through a government tender to operate advanced cloud infrastructure for AI model training, utilizing NVIDIA's latest hardware.