Nvidia acquired Illumex, an Israeli startup whose software organises a company's data into a shared business vocabulary that AI systems can use, Calcalist reported on 23 February 2026. An Nvidia spokesperson confirmed the deal.
Neither company disclosed financial terms. Calcalist estimated the price at about $60 million, while Globes reported that Nvidia would pay $75 million. Illumex had raised about $13 million in seed funding.
Illumex's employees joined Nvidia after the acquisition, Calcalist reported. Nvidia did not say whether the Illumex product would continue to be sold on its own.
What Illumex built
Illumex's product, the Generative Semantic Fabric, takes an organisation's existing data and knowledge and turns it into business ontologies: structured definitions of the terms a company uses and how they relate to each other. The platform automates the creation of a semantic layer that joins data silos, adds business context and keeps a consistent vocabulary of domain-specific terms, with governance built in.
The aim is to let AI agents interpret employees' requests correctly against a company's real data. Illumex said the approach reduces hallucinations and can cut total cost of ownership by up to 80%, according to Calcalist; that figure is the company's own claim.
Globes described the business as managing enterprise data and creating common languages between different databases. The startup took part in the Intel Ignite and ICON accelerator programmes.
“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.”
Why Nvidia is buying
Nvidia said Illumex's team would help it build software for companies adopting agentic AI. Its spokesperson said the team's expertise in building ontologies would help Nvidia accelerate the development of libraries and models for enterprise use of AI agents.
According to Globes, Nvidia plans to use the technology to offer large companies and cloud providers a software layer that manages enterprise data held in different repositories, both for training AI models and for running AI agents.
The deal adds to Nvidia's software and model tooling for enterprises. Globes compared it to Nvidia's 2024 purchase of Deci, an Israeli startup whose technology compresses large language models so that organisations can run them more efficiently.
The founder and the funding
Inna Tokarev Sela founded Illumex in 2021 in Tel Aviv and served as its chief executive. She was previously associate vice president and head of AI at the business intelligence company Sisense, and senior director of machine learning at SAP.
The company raised about $13 million, mainly from Israeli investors. Calcalist listed Cardumen Capital, Amdocs Ventures, Samsung Ventures, ICI Fund, Jibe Ventures, Iron Nation Fund, Ginnosar Ventures, ICON Fund and Today Ventures among its backers, along with angel investors. Globes, citing PitchBook data, said a June 2024 round had valued Illumex at $32 million, meaning the reported sale price is more than double that valuation.
Advisers and open questions
The law firm Herzog, Fox & Neeman advised Illumex on the sale, with a team led by partners Yair Geva, Lior Katz and Nathan Wiesenberg, according to Israel Desks. Nvidia's advisers were not named.
Several details were not made public, including how many people joined Nvidia from Illumex, whether the price included payments tied to future targets, and whether existing Illumex customers would keep access to the platform. The gap between the $60 million and $75 million figures reported by the two Israeli business papers was not resolved, and Nvidia did not comment on the price.
Nvidia's growing base in Israel
Illumex is the latest in a series of Israeli acquisitions by Nvidia. In 2024 it bought Run:AI for about $800 million and Deci for about $300 million, Calcalist reported. Its largest Israeli deal remains the $6.9 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2019, which became the foundation of its main Israeli site in Yokneam.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang praised the company's Israeli staff at CES 2026, describing them as hardworking, smart and dedicated, and saying Nvidia had been very successful in the country.
