Nvidia acquires predictive AI startup Kumo AI for over $400M

Nvidia ↗2.95% acquired Kumo AI, which builds predictive models for enterprise data, for more than $400 million, according to The Information.theinformation
Kumo’s technology uses graph neural networks and plugs into data warehouses like Snowflake ↘0.95% and Databricks, serving clients including Reddit ↗5.43% and DoorDash ↗4.71%.siliconangle
The Sequoia Capital-backed startup’s co-founders have already joined Nvidia, reflecting a broader push to bundle AI software with its chip hardware.siliconangle

Nvidia Acquires Predictive AI Startup Kumo AI for Over $400 Million

Nvidia has acquired Kumo AI, a startup specializing in predictive AI models for enterprise customers, in a deal valued at more than $400 million, according to a report by The Information. The acquisition, confirmed on Tuesday, adds another AI company to Nvidia’s growing collection of software assets as the chipmaker seeks to expand beyond hardware sales.theinformation

What Kumo AI Does

Kumo AI builds foundation models trained on companies’ own business data to generate predictions — answering questions like “Will this customer churn?” or “What demand can we expect next quarter?” — without requiring months of traditional data science work. The startup’s platform plugs directly into data warehouses such as Snowflake and Databricks, automatically handling data preparation and eliminating up to 95% of the manual effort typically required to build predictive models.siliconangle

The company’s core technology relies on Graph Neural Networks, which map relationships across entire datasets rather than analyzing rows of data in isolation. This approach enables more context-aware predictions by considering how customers, products and transactions are interconnected.siliconangle

Kumo launched KumoRFM-2 in April, a foundation model the company said was the first to outperform supervised machine learning on enterprise prediction tasks, scaling to more than 500 billion rows of data. Its customers include Reddit, DoorDash and the U.K. grocery chain J Sainsbury.prnewswire

Deal Context

Mountain View, California-based Kumo had raised $37 million in venture capital across two rounds in 2022, with Sequoia Capital as its most prominent backer. Co-founder and CEO Vanja Josifovski, along with co-founders Hema Raghavan and Jure Leskovec, have already transitioned to Nvidia, according to their LinkedIn profiles.businesswire

Nvidia did not publicly disclose the terms, but The Information reported the price exceeded $400 million, citing a person with knowledge of the deal. The acquisition follows Nvidia’s purchase of data semantics startup Illumex for about $75 million in February and its reported $20 billion acqui-hire of AI inference company Groq’s technology assets.siliconangle

The deal reflects Nvidia’s strategy of bundling customized AI models with its hardware to offer enterprises a more complete AI stack, reducing its dependence on chip sales alone as it reported record first-quarter revenue of $81.6 billion.ad-hoc-news