In recent news, a semiconductor giant based in the United States, Intel, made an announcement revealing that it was purchasing Granulate. A computing tech startup from the State of Israel, it will be sold for no less than $650 million. This is the seventh purchase of an Israeli company by the chip multinational in the last five years. Previously, Intel acquired Mobileye a company based in Jerusalem. Its autonomous driving systems had appealed to the semiconductor giant, which went on to finalize the purchase in 2017, for a figure of $15.3 million. To this day, it is the largest tech exit for a firm in the Jewish state. Intel made an announcement personally, confirming that it had purchased Granulate. It further added that this acquisition will aid data and cloud center customers to maximize the workload performance of their computers.
Moreover, they will also be able to cut down on cloud and infrastructure costs. While the terms of the agreement were not revealed to the public, it was hinted that the deal had been valued for around $650 million. In the year 2018, Granulate was established in the city of Tel Aviv by the current CEO, Asaf Ezra, and CTO, Tal Asaiag. The firm developed an optimization layer powered by artificial intelligence. According to the company, this could help improve the computing performance of clients, as well as enable them to take better control of workloads. Furthermore, its system aids in the reduction of response times by at least 40% and brings down expenses of computing by no less than 60%.
The startup had first teamed up with the US-based semiconductor giant back in 2021. The aim of the two companies joining hands had been to come up with an automated solution that reduces latency in cloud deployments and enhances the workload performance simultaneously. The project had been named Intel Workload Optimizer and the tool was leveraged by Mobileye, in order to improve on its cloud-based self-driving systems. These included various other technologies of Mobileye, such as cameras, AI applications, and mapping systems. Granulate also took part in the first cohort held by Intel Ignite back in 2019. This was a startup program that focused on deep tech companies in their early stages.
The Israel-based computing tech company was able to raise around $45 million from investors, such as Insight Partners, Red Dot Capital Partners, Hetz Ventures, and TLV Partners. The agreement has been predicted to be closed sometime later this year. 120 employees currently working at Granulate will be integrated into the AI business and Datacenter unit of Intel. Sandra River, the general manager and executive vice president of the AI and Datacenter Group at Intel, stated that the tech from Granulate will help strengthen the ambitions of the US based company to successfully meet growing demand in this new era of computing. She added how the data and cloud center customers these days want high-performance and scalable software to ensure their hardware is being deployed to the full.