Qwak

Four founders and one gap

Qwak was founded in 2020 by Alon Lev, who served as CEO, Lior Penso, Ran Romano and Yuval Fernbach. It stepped into a familiar gap in organizations that develop AI: data scientists know how to build a model, but getting from a model that works on the researcher's computer to a model that runs inside a product, gets updated and is measured requires a whole infrastructure. Without that infrastructure, every team builds it again from scratch, and data scientists stay dependent on the development teams at every step. Lev summed up the vision as changing the way development teams and data scientists work together to bring models into production.

The platform

Qwak's product is a platform that follows a model through its whole life: building, training, deployment, monitoring and management. According to CTech, it reduced the dependence between data science teams and development teams, and provided an orderly, documented work environment in which a model can be managed from the moment it is built into the product. This field is called MLOps: extending the working methods of modern software development to the world of machine learning models. The acquisition announcement said the platform handles both large language models and classic models.

Funding and sales

Qwak raised $27 million according to CTech, or more than $25 million according to Globes, from funds including Bessemer Venture Partners, which led the last round, StageOne, Leaders Fund, Nordstar and Amiti. According to PitchBook data cited by Globes, the company was valued at $64 million in its last round, in March 2023. In 2023 it recorded sales of a few million dollars, according to CTech, and at the time of the acquisition it employed about 45 people. These are the figures of a young, relatively small company, and they are worth keeping in mind when looking at the acquisition price.

The acquisition by JFrog

On 25 June 2024, JFrog, an Israeli-American software supply chain management company that trades on Nasdaq, announced an agreement to buy Qwak for $230 million. JFrog's quarterly report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission confirms that the acquisition was completed on 9 July 2024, and that the consideration of about $230 million, for the shares and for part of the employees' service after the acquisition, included cash, JFrog shares and equity compensation, subject to adjustments. Globes calculated that the company's value had grown fourfold within 15 months, and described the deal as a quick profit for the early investors.

Inside JFrog

JFrog's logic was to connect two worlds. Its main product, Artifactory, stores organizations' software components. The acquisition announcement described it as the model registry, and the company's scanning tool as a tool for securing models. CEO Shlomi Ben Haim said that software supply chain platforms "will need to expand and natively include MLOps solutions". In 2026 JFrog offers a product called JFrog ML for training, deploying and monitoring models, alongside tools for managing AI agents and their components. Qwak thus joins a list of Israeli MLOps companies that were acquired, alongside Iguazio and cnvrg.io.

Qwak's official website now presents the platform under the name JFrog ML and states explicitly that this is the new name of Qwak. So the name Qwak describes the company and the product before the merger, while the current product is offered under the JFrog brand.