Today, we are thrilled to announce a monumental milestone in Clarifai’s journey: we have entered into an agreement for Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS), the AI cloud company, to license our core engineering and research talent and license our AI inference and compute orchestration intellectual property.
For over a decade, we at Clarifai were obsessed with building the ultimate software layer for AI. As the industry’s fastest AI inference and reasoning platform on GPUs, we focused on system-level inference optimization, empowering developers with seamless compute orchestration to run models cost-effectively. Now, we take our technology to the biggest stage possible.
Why We Are Thrilled to Join Nebius
When looking at the future of AI, it is obvious that delivering efficient execution at scale requires a seamless marriage of model optimization, software design and compute orchestration.
Here is why our team is incredibly energized about this transition:
- Building the 4th Hyperscaler: Nebius is on a mission to become the world’s fourth hyperscaler, aiming to offer more compute to external customers than any of the existing cloud giants. By joining forces, our team becomes a crucial ingredient in extending Nebius from the leading AI infrastructure company into a full-stack AI powerhouse.
- Better Together: Nebius builds their own servers, allowing them to control their technical roadmap, margins, and destiny. Combining their world-class infrastructure and global capacity with our compute orchestration technology will allow us to co-create a fully optimized hardware and software stack for unmatched performance.
- Elite Pedigree and Culture: Nebius is led by a world-class team, including CEO Arkady Volozh, who possesses a long-term vision to win in the AI space. Our team has seen firsthand that their culture is high-energy, mission-driven, and built on a “You Know Best” philosophy that empowers employees to do what is right without unnecessary red tape.
- Keeping the Band Together: Nebius didn’t just want our IP; they explicitly asked for the people who built it. This means we get to keep our core team together and continue working on what we do best, seamlessly transitioning our momentum into this new endeavor.
Supercharging the Nebius Token Factory
Our licensing agreement is set to strengthen directly the Nebius Token Factory to create a complete, full-stack inference platform. While Nebius’s recent acquisition of Eigen AI focuses on optimizing at the model level, Clarifai optimizes the system, creating the end-to-end infrastructure required to run complex AI models reliably in production.
Our performance optimization will compete with the industry’s highest speeds, enhance compute orchestration to open the cloud to a broader customer base and push the boundaries of Nebus Token Factory.
A New Era of Frontier AI Research
As part of this transition, I am incredibly proud to share that I will be taking on the role of SVP Research at Nebius. I will be leading a dedicated new research unit focused on frontier AI innovations, including agentic reasoning, multimodal world models, token efficiency, and long-term memory.
The future of AI—from advanced agentic systems to frontier models—depends entirely on the infrastructure powering it. By bringing together our proven expertise in training state of the art AI models with Nebius’s elite team, we are uniquely positioned to become one of the strongest combined AI teams on the planet.
The scope of the agreement is limited to Clarifai’s modern AI inference and compute orchestration technology. It does not include Clarifai’s legacy computer vision models. The Clarifai brand or trademark, or any intellectual property, products, services, or commercial arrangements associated with Clarifai’s US government and defense programs.
A Sincere Thank You to Our Team and Community
As we embark on this new chapter, I want to take a moment to thank the incredible team at Clarifai. Building this platform for over a decade was an amazing journey only made possible by the dedication, brilliance, and hard work of every single person who was a part of this company. While not everyone will be transitioning with us to Nebius, I am profoundly grateful for the foundational contributions each of you has made. Your work has left an indelible mark on the AI industry.
I want to personally thank you for everything you have done to get us to this milestone.
We also want to thank our amazing community, partners, and customers who have supported Clarifai’s vision from the very beginning. We can’t wait to embark on this rocket ship and build the ultimate foundation for the next decade of AI inference.
Onward!
Matthew Zeiler, Ph.D. Founder and CEO, Clarifai
