Cloud infrastructure provider Nscale will acquire AI software startup Anyscale, which has Romanian-born university professor Ion Stoica among its co-founders, in a transaction worth roughly USD 1.65 billion, according to a Bloomberg News source.
Ion Stoica is a co-founder of Anyscale, together with Robert Nishihara (chief executive officer) and Philipp Moritz (chief technology officer), who were his PhD students at RISELab within the University of California, Berkeley.
San Francisco-based Anyscale provides software for organizing and managing complex AI workloads so that they can run smoothly across multiple computers simultaneously. Nscale said it expects to attract more customers by offering Anyscale’s software.
Anyscale will continue to operate under its own brand and serve its existing customers, the companies said. Anyscale’s entire team of approximately 200 people across the United States, Europe and India will join Nscale as part of the acquisition.
The transaction is expected to be completed in the second half of this year, the companies said.
Anyscale recorded revenue growth of 70% compared with the previous quarter in the company’s most recent quarter, according to a blog post by its co-founders.
Originally from Romania, Stoica left for the United States in the late 1990s to pursue his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University. Since 2000, he has been teaching at UC Berkeley, where he leads a laboratory funded largely by technology companies such as Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, and IBM, with an annual budget of more than USD 6 million.
Stoica became a billionaire by launching four startups that originated from his research laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The most valuable of them, Databricks and Anyscale, started as open-source projects within the university. The first was valued at USD 134 billion earlier this year.
Before Databricks, Stoica also co-founded video streaming startup Conviva.
(Photo source: Dataversity.net)
