Nvidia acquires Israeli AI startup Illumex for $60 million
The Israeli company’s Generative Semantic Fabric (GSF) platform transforms an enterprise's organizational corpus of knowledge into AI-ready, context-rich business language embedded into semantic ontologies.
Nvidia has acquired Israeli startup Illumex, Calcalist has learned. Financial terms were not disclosed, though the deal is estimated to be in the region of $60 million. The company has raised about $13 million to date in a Seed round.
Investors in Illumex include Cardumen Capital, Amdocs Ventures, Samsung Ventures, ICI Fund, Jibe Ventures, Iron Nation Fund, Ginnosar Ventures, ICON Fund, Today Ventures, and angel investors.
Illumex was founded in 2021 by Inna Tokarev Sela, a former AVP & Head of AI at Sisense and Senior Director of Machine Learning at SAP. The company is a graduate of the Intel Ignite and ICON accelerator programs. Following the acquisition, Illumex’s employees joined Nvidia.
An NVIDIA spokesperson said: "We’re excited to welcome the Illumex team to NVIDIA. Their deep expertise in building ontologies will help us accelerate the development of libraries and models to enable enterprise adoption of agentic AI."
The company’s Generative Semantic Fabric (GSF) platform transforms an enterprise's organizational corpus of knowledge into AI-ready, context-rich business language embedded into semantic ontologies. These business ontologies, which serve as a basis for data management, analytics, and agentic workflows, enable AI agents to interpret prompts with precision, eliminating hallucinations, ensuring compliance, and reducing TCO by up to 80%.
Illumex helps organizations to overcome data challenges that hinder generative AI (GenAI) initiatives by automating the creation of a semantic layer that unifies data silos and adds business context, as well as generating a consistent vocabulary of domain-specific terminology.
"Our Generative Semantic Fabric aligns organizational data with business meaning and domain-specific context, allowing organizations to finally trust the results of their AI initiatives," Tokarev Sela told Calcalist following the startup’s Seed round. "By enabling business users to interact reliably with data using natural language, without teaching them the precise technical definitions, we're democratizing AI and empowering enterprises to make better decisions."
Nvidia last acquired Israeli companies in 2024 when it purchased Run:AI for around $800 million and Deci for about $300 million.
Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offered rare insight into the company’s operations in Israel at a press conference during CES 2026, emphasizing the central role the country plays in the world’s most valuable technology company. Nvidia has been operating in Israel since its $6.9 billion acquisition of networking firm Mellanox in 2019. The acquisition transformed Mellanox’s Yokneam headquarters into Nvidia’s primary Israeli hub, which now employs roughly 3,000 of the company’s 5,000 Israeli staff.
"Our team in Israel is incredible. They're hardworking, they're smart, they're dedicated, they care about the company, they care about their people, they care about the country," Huang said when asked about Nvidia’s presence in Israel. "The sacrifices they make for each other, for their country, is incredible, and we’ve been very, very successful there."
The praise came amid Nvidia’s ongoing expansion in the country. In December, the company formally confirmed plans to establish a 160,000-square-meter campus in Kiryat Tivon, expected to employ roughly 10,000 workers. The facility will be built on 90 dunams of state-owned land granted with an exemption from public tender, representing one of the largest private technology investments in Israel in recent years.
