Nvidia Acquires Israeli Startup Excelero For Its Block Storage Expertise

American semiconductor giant Nvidia has acquired Tel Aviv-based software-defined storage startup, Excelero, the company announced on Monday.

The acquisition will bring Excelero’s technology, technical talent, and expertise in block storage to Nvidia.

Excelero will continue to expand support for block storage in Nvidia’s enterprise software stack, such as high-performance computing clusters. The acquisition will enrich Nvidia Israel’s R&D expertise with a new software-defined storage team that will help expand support for block-storage in the US company’s enterprise software stack.

Excelero’s engineering team, which includes its own founders, will be absorbed into Nvidia Israel.

In January, Nvidia announced plans to expand its R&D activities in Israel.

Following the $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox in April 2020, Nvidia Israel has grown by nearly a third to more than 2,800 employees, with teams based in Yokneam, Tel-Hai, Raanana, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Jerusalem, Kiryat Gat, and Beer Sheva. 

Nvidia is a company that in recent years has become a leader in artificial intelligence computing with respect to gaming, autonomous vehicles, robotics, data centers, and professional visualization, will continue to support all of Excelero’s clientele as part of the acquisition.

Founded in 2014, Excelero enables customers to build distributed, high-performance server storage area networks (SANs) with standard hardware for applications at any scale. Excelero has collaborated with Nvidia in the past to upgrade Excelero’s storage software with remote direct memory access (RDMA), which is integral to InfiniBand and RoCE ethernet networks. 

“We are delighted to keep our growth momentum in Israel and welcome Excelero into Nvidia,” said Dror Goldenberg, senior VP of software architecture at Nvidia Israel.  “The company and its talented team bring extensive experience and deep technical expertise in accelerated software-defined storage and networking. The acquisition will support our efforts in expanding Nvidia Israel’s areas of activity, with Excelero joining our fast-growing software group.”

“The Excelero team is joining Nvidia as demand is surging for high-performance computing and AI,” said Yaniv Romem, co-founder and CEO at Excelero. “We’ll be working with Nvidia to ensure our existing customers are supported, and going forward we’re thrilled to apply our expertise in block storage to Nvidia’s world-class AI and HPC platforms.”