Iguazio

Four founders from Israel's veteran infrastructure industry

Iguazio was founded in 2014 by Asaf Somekh, Yaron Haviv, Yaron Segev and Orit Nissan-Messing, entrepreneurs who came from senior roles at established Israeli infrastructure companies such as XtremIO, XIV, Mellanox and Radvision, all of which were later acquired by global corporations.

MLOps: the gap between the research notebook and the production system

MLOps is the set of tools and practices that moves a model from the researcher's notebook to a production system that runs every day. A model in production needs to receive fresh data in real time, run under changing load, and be replaced by a new version without shutting down the service that depends on it. A high share of AI projects in organizations get stuck at exactly this stage, not at the research stage.

MLRun: an open-source contribution that became a standard

The company's best-known contribution is MLRun, an open-source framework for orchestrating model runs, which was adopted outside its own customer base too. Releasing a core component as open source is a common move in infrastructure: it spreads a standard and builds a community, while the revenue comes from the managed service on top of it.

January 2023: the McKinsey acquisition, according to the official company page

According to Iguazio's official company page, the company was acquired by McKinsey in January 2023 and became part of QuantumBlack, the firm's artificial intelligence arm. Today its technology is used both by McKinsey's own internal data science and engineering teams and as a basis for digital transformation projects for its clients around the world. According to a Calcalist report, all four founders and a team of about 70 data and AI experts moved to McKinsey as part of the deal, which was valued at about $50 million. Until then the company had raised about $72 million.

An exit without an IPO: a familiar pattern in Israeli tech

Iguazio is an example of a familiar pattern: a company that does not reach an IPO or a huge acquisition, but whose technology and team are bought by a large organization that wants to build an in-house capability quickly. For McKinsey, which is not a technology company, it was a way to get an experienced engineering team all at once. For the founders, all of whom came from companies that had been acquired before, it was a fourth or fifth exit in their careers.