Nvidia acquires Canadian AI startup CentML – report

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) has acquired Toronto-based AI startup CentML, The Logic reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

The acquisition was a significant outcome for CentML and its investors, the report added.

Nvidia declined to comment in an email to Seeking Alpha.

CentML CEO Gennady Pekhimenko is now a senior director for AI software at Nvidia, while chief technology officer, or CTO, Sam Wang and COO Akbar Nurlybayev have taken managerial roles at the AI chipmaker, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Nvidia also brought on at least 15 other engineers and two interns this month who formerly worked at the startup, as per LinkedIn profile data, the report added.

CentML had raised about $30.9M in total in venture capital, according to PitchBook data, the report noted.

The company will cease operations and its AI-optimization services would not be available as of July 17, as per a message Nurlybayev sent customers on June 17 that was posted in the company’s community Slack channel and on a post on X, formerly Twitter.

Not all of CentML’s employees are joining Nvidia. In a LinkedIn post last week, one CentML salesperson noted that his role and others had been eliminated in an “organizational restructuring,” according to the report.

In early June, CentML dissolved its federal corporation and reincorporated under British Columbia law, the report noted.

CentML already had collaborations with Nvidia. The U.S. tech giant participated in CentML’s $27M seed round in October 2023. In November 2024, CentML announced it had enrolled in Nvidia’s accelerator program, the report added.

CentML was founded in 2022 and was one of several companies promising to help clients run AI systems more efficiently and cheaply. The company’s software slotted in between users’ AI models and the chips powering them, and tapped under-used hardware capacity and employed other methods to make the systems run better. The startup developed its own compiler, which translates code for applications to a machine language which processors can understand, the report noted.

At Nvidia, CentML’s former engineers will be working on software, the report added.

The acquisition comes at a time when Nvidia’s stock is on a roll. Year-to-date, the stock has jumped about 17%. The shares have been in the green this week and are expected to end Friday with gains. As of 12:17 p.m. ET, the stock had climbed about 1.71% on Friday.

The AI company, which currently has a market cap of about $3.78T, is in the running to hit $4T market cap this year and could reach the $5T milestone in the next 18 months, as the AI revolution looks to be accelerating, according to Wedbush.