TLDR
- Nebius has acquired Israeli startup Inferize in a deal estimated at $100-150 million, though exact terms weren’t disclosed.
- Inferize built technology that cuts GPU idle time during AI model launches and demand spikes.
- The startup was only 10 months old and had just 17 employees at the time of the deal.
- Inferize was founded by Guy Bortnikov and Lior Gorbonos, both former members of Granulate’s founding team.
- This marks Nebius’s latest acquisition following its $275 million deal for Tavily earlier this year.
Nebius has agreed to buy Inferize, a young Israeli AI startup, in a deal worth an estimated $100 million to $150 million. Nebius trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker NBIS, and the stock is an AI cloud infrastructure company led by Arkady Volozh.
Inferize was founded in January 2026 by Guy Bortnikov and Lior Gorbonos. Both previously worked together at Granulate, an infrastructure company that Intel acquired back in 2022.
The startup operated in stealth mode for most of its short life. It had just 17 employees working out of Tel Aviv offices when the deal closed.
Inferize’s core technology addresses a specific problem in AI infrastructure. When AI models need to respond to requests, their weights must load first, a process called a cold start.
This loading process can leave expensive GPUs sitting unused while new instances come online. The same issue can happen when model weights update during tasks like reinforcement learning.
The Problem Inferize Solves
Companies running AI at scale face a tough choice. They can keep spare GPU capacity ready for demand spikes, but that means paying for hardware that often does nothing.
Or they can run closer to actual demand and risk being too slow when workloads suddenly increase. Inferize’s technology aims to let capacity scale more closely with real usage.
This should boost GPU utilization and lower the cost of handling each AI request. The startup built a working prototype within just three months of launching.
“Keeping spare GPUs running is the price of being ready for demand,” said Bortnikov, who serves as CEO. He added that removing that cost was the whole point of building Inferize.
Nebius has not disclosed the exact financial terms of the acquisition. Industry estimates place the value between $100 million and $150 million.
Part of a Bigger Pattern
This isn’t Nebius’s first Israeli acquisition this year. Back in February, Nebius agreed to buy Tavily for an initial $275 million, with total value potentially reaching $400 million based on performance targets.
Tavily built a search layer for AI agents that Nebius plans to fold into its cloud platform. Nebius also held talks with AI21 this year about a possible acquisition.
Those AI21 negotiations ended without a deal. The two companies instead formed a commercial partnership, and AI21 later cut more than 60% of its workforce while shifting focus to its Maestro platform.
Nebius is also expanding its physical footprint in Israel. The company has signed deals for data center capacity and was selected to build a national AI supercomputer there.
Planned facilities include sites in Modi’in, Masmiyya, and Beit Shemesh. Shahar Tzafrir, managing partner at TLV Partners, which backed Inferize’s seed round, commented on the deal.
“We already knew the team, and they knew us, through our seed investment in Granulate,” Tzafrir said. He called finding a team capable of solving such a complex technical challenge “exceptionally rare.”
Inferize will now operate inside Nebius Token Factory, the company’s managed inference platform. It joins other technologies already folded into that platform, including Eigen AI and parts of Clarifai’s core team.
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