Latest / Israel Tech Daily / Nebius buys Inferize, enso raises $15 million, and Snyk's layoffs in numbers

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Nebius buys Inferize, enso raises $15 million, and Snyk's layoffs in numbers · Israel Tech Daily

• 0:00
  Rachel: Nebius has bought Inferize, a Tel Aviv startup founded just ten months ago, for somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty million dollars.
• 0:08
  Eli: And one of OpenWeb's co-founders says the company's fall began the day its founder was pushed out.
• 0:19
  Rachel: Good morning, it's Friday, the second of October. I'm Rachel.
• 0:23
  Eli: And I'm Eli. Today: Nebius closes an Israeli deal, a fifteen million dollar round for the AI marketing startup enso, Snyk's layoffs in numbers, and a founder's view of OpenWeb's collapse.
• 0:37
  Rachel: Yesterday we told you that Nebius, the Nasdaq-listed AI cloud company, was exploring an Israeli acquisition. Today it has announced one. Nebius says it has acquired Inferize, which Globes calls a ten-month-old Israeli startup.
• 0:52
  Eli: The price wasn't disclosed. Globes, citing sources, puts it at between a hundred and a hundred and thirty million dollars. CTech estimates a hundred to a hundred and fifty million. Globes says it sold before even launching its products commercially.
• 1:06
  Rachel: Inferize was founded by CEO Guy Bortnikov and CTO Lior Gorbonos. According to CTech, both were on the founding team of Granulate, which Intel bought in 2022 for about six hundred and fifty million dollars. CTech says Inferize raised a ten million dollar seed round in stealth, led by TLV Partners, and it has seventeen employees in Tel Aviv.
• 1:30
  Eli: The problem it solves is expensive. An AI model has to load into GPU memory before it can answer anyone. That's called a cold start, and meanwhile the chips sit idle. Globes explains that companies keep spare GPUs running just to be ready for demand. Inferize is meant to cut that wait.
• 1:47
  Rachel: Nebius says the team built a working prototype within three months. The technology and the team will go into Token Factory, the Nebius platform that runs AI models for companies and developers. Bortnikov told Globes that keeping spare GPUs running is the price of being ready for demand, and removing that cost is what they built Inferize to do.
• 2:08
  Eli: It fits a pattern. CTech reminds us that Nebius bought the Israeli search startup Tavily in February, for an initial two hundred and seventy-five million dollars. And GuruFocus reports that Nebius shares slipped about one and a half percent after the announcement.
• 2:24
  Rachel: Next, funding. enso, which builds AI agents for marketing and sales, has raised fifteen million dollars in a Series A. CTech reports the round was led by MoreTech Ventures, with existing investor NFX, Phenomen VC and Gil Hirsch taking part. That brings its total funding to twenty-three million dollars.
• 2:44
  Eli: enso was founded in 2024 by Mickey Haslavsky, who previously co-founded RapidAPI. The idea is that the places customers find companies keep shifting, from search and social feeds to AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. enso's agents study how each platform ranks and cites content, run small experiments, and keep what works.
• 3:07
  Rachel: CTech says customers include Papaya Global, MyHeritage and Natural Intelligence. For each one, enso embeds an engineer and a marketer, and the company says sensitive or irreversible actions stay under human control. It has twenty-six employees, most of them in Israel.
• 3:24
  Rachel: Yesterday we went through Snyk's numbers from its filings in the UK. Today, CTech has found more in the latest filing. Snyk cut two hundred and three employees in June, about twenty percent of its global workforce.
• 3:38
  Eli: The filing puts their cost at between twelve point eight and thirteen point eight million dollars, mostly this year. And it comes after earlier shrinking. Snyk ended 2025 with nine hundred and ninety full-time employees, down from eleven hundred and sixty-two a year before.
• 3:55
  Rachel: The filing also shows Snyk has effectively moved away from technology it bought from two Israeli startups, Helios and Enso Security. That's a different company from the enso we just mentioned. Snyk decided further use of the technology had become, in its words, de minimis, and recorded a three point two million dollar charge.
• 4:17
  Eli: CTech says Snyk paid thirty-two point seven million dollars for Enso Security in 2023, and bought Helios, founded by Eli Cohen and Ran Nozik, in early 2024. By the end of 2025, the value of both technologies on Snyk's books was zero.
• 4:35
  Rachel: OpenWeb. This week a Tel Aviv court appointed a temporary receiver at the request of its lender. Now one of its co-founders is talking. Ishay Green, its early chief technology officer, told Globes: if Nadav had stayed CEO, they would have gone public and gone further. That's my opinion.
• 4:54
  Eli: That's Nadav Shoval, who co-founded the company in 2012 as Spot.IM, and ran it for more than a decade until the board removed him in September 2024. The two sides fought in public and later settled. Green told Globes that a tech company without the founder who built it won't survive, and that from that moment, OpenWeb started counting down.
• 5:15
  Rachel: A market source told Globes that growth stalled after that fight, though it also blamed a tough market. The same source says OpenWeb still has about a hundred and fifty million unique users in America, and more than five thousand publishers.
• 5:28
  Eli: And the company is still operating. Its CEO, Jim Daily, told Adweek that from the company's perspective it is business as usual, and that it hopes for a good resolution. Adweek also notes that OpenWeb rejects the lender's allegations, including that it failed to promptly disclose the loss of its partnership with Microsoft.
• 5:48
  Rachel: Now the quick round-up. CTech's tally for the first nine months of the year: Israeli startups raised thirteen point two billion dollars across a hundred and ninety-two disclosed rounds. That's about eighty-five percent of all of 2025, which came to fifteen point six billion. CTech calls its number a floor, since deals without a disclosed amount are left out.
• 6:11
  Eli: Microsoft's annual cyber defense report ranks Israel as the second most targeted country for cyberattacks, after America, in the year to June. CTech reports Israel drew seven point six percent of global threat activity, and that thirty-nine percent of Iranian state-backed operations Microsoft tracked were aimed at Israel.
• 6:31
  Rachel: And Ynetnews reports that Ynon Kreiz, the Ramat Gan-born chief executive of Mattel, will become co-CEO of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery once their hundred and ten billion dollar merger closes. He'll run day-to-day operations and the integration, alongside David Ellison.
• 6:49
  Rachel: One thing to watch. What Nebius does next in Israel. Inferize joins Tavily, and CTech lists planned Nebius facilities in Modi'in, Masmiyya and Beit Shemesh. Each step makes Israeli teams a bigger part of how Nebius builds its platform.
• 7:04
  Eli: And at OpenWeb, whether a buyer comes forward for the business while the receiver is in charge. We'll keep following it.
• 7:12
  Rachel: That's Israel Tech Daily for this week. If this was useful, follow the show wherever you're listening, and read our startup profiles at Startup to Follow dot com.
• 7:21
  Eli: Thanks for listening. Shabbat shalom. See you Sunday morning.