Illumex

The problem: data without a shared business language

Illumex was founded in 2021 by Inna Tokarev Sela, who had previously been head of AI at Sisense and a senior machine learning executive at SAP. The data in a large organization sits in tables built up over years, with abbreviated column names and conflicting definitions for the same business term. A model asked a simple business question may produce an answer that sounds reasonable but is not correct. This failure is especially dangerous because there is no outside sign of the mistake.

Generative Semantic Fabric: a business ontology for data

The company's answer, called Generative Semantic Fabric, automatically maps the organization's data structures and translates them into a semantic layer: a representation in understandable business language that a model can query, instead of technical field names. In professional terms, the company builds an ontology (a map of the concepts in the organization and the relationships between them) and attaches it to the data itself, using an approach that touches only the metadata and not the data values themselves.

Recognition and collaboration with Nvidia even before the acquisition

According to the company's official page, Illumex was recognized in early 2025 as a "Technology Pioneer 2025" by the World Economic Forum, and worked with NVIDIA even before the acquisition, including an integration of NVIDIA AI software to speed up digital transformation in ERP systems, published in March 2025. (The live version of illumex.ai went dark after the acquisition; the text here is based on an archived Wayback Machine copy of the page from when it was still online.)

February 2026: the acquisition by Nvidia

According to a Calcalist report, Nvidia bought Illumex in February 2026 in a deal estimated at about $60 million. Another source, Globes, also mentions an estimate of $75 million, and the exact amount has not been settled in the reports. An Nvidia spokesperson was quoted in the press: "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." A direct search of Nvidia's official newsroom did not turn up a separate acquisition announcement of its own.

Nvidia's wave of Israeli acquisitions in the data field

The company belongs to a wave of Israeli companies bought for mid-sized sums by tech giants looking for a specific capability and an experienced team, not market share. Nvidia alone has bought several Israeli AI infrastructure companies in recent years, including Deci AI. For the reader, the case shows the gap between a model that can phrase a nice answer and a system that gives a correct answer, a gap that runs through tedious data work that the end user never sees.