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The chip giant is acquiring Granulate in a deal that is reportedly valued at $650m.
Intel confirmed today (31 March) that it is acquiring Israeli AI start-up Granulate to help its cloud and data centre customers optimise workload performance.
While neither company has revealed financial details of the transaction, sources familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that Intel valued Granulate at $650m.
Granulate is an AI-powered workload optimisation software start-up that helps small and medium-size businesses improve software response times and reduce costs across multiple cloud and physical environments.
Modern cloud computing architectures and their associated performance issues have increased in complexity, and traditional operating systems are not always the best fit to solve the issues. This is where Intel hopes to use Granulate software to reduce CPU utilisation and latency for its clients.
Sandra Rivera, executive VP and general manager of the data centre and AI group at Intel, said that customers “demand scalable, high-performance software to make the most of their hardware deployments”.
“Granulate’s cutting-edge autonomous optimisation software can be applied to production workloads without requiring the customer to make changes to its code, driving optimised hardware and software value for every cloud and data centre customer,” she added.
Granulate software
Granulate has built software that does not require developer intervention or customers to make changes to the code, and its optimisations for CPUs can be applied even on legacy Linux systems.
Asaf Ezra, co-founder and CEO of Granulate, said that the acquisition has the potential to help customers “achieve meaningful cost reductions and five times the throughput across workloads”.
“As a part of Intel, Granulate will be able to deliver autonomous optimisation capabilities to even more customers globally and rapidly expand its offering with the help of Intel’s 19,000 software engineers,” he said.
The acquisition is expected to be completed by the second quarter of 2022, after which all 120 employees of Granulate will be added to Intel’s data centre and AI business unit.
Granulate raised $30m in its most recent funding round a little more than a year ago. The Series B investment was led by Red Dot Capital Partners, with backing from Insight Partners, TLV Partners, Hetz Ventures and Dawn Capital.
Last month, Intel announced its intention to acquire another Israeli company, chipmaker Tower Semiconductor, for around $5.4bn to help scale foundry services globally.
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