Why We Invested in Atero—and Why Crusoe Agreed
In just over a year, Atero went from seed investment to acquisition—proving how visionary founders can transform AI workload orchestration and redefine efficiency in the AI stack.
We are thrilled to announce that our portfolio company Atero was acquired by Crusoe. We led the seed round in Atero just over a year ago, and the team has achieved remarkable things in the time since – culminating with this exciting news. We never were able to celebrate them coming out of stealth until now, and this is quite the way to make an entrance!
In the Spring of 2024, we found ourselves down a rabbit hole of AI workload orchestration. The general idea was: AI workloads are becoming so important, but they are run quite inefficiently. Existing orchestration software, namely Kubernetes and Slurm, were not built for these workloads at all. As a result, orchestration is an inefficient part of the AI stack, and given the cost of these workloads, a place for potentially massive cost savings with better stability, speed, and overall performance. We were so excited about this idea that we wrote two blog posts about it in March and May of 2024.
A reader of our newsletter re-introduced us to Alon Yariv after reading these two editions. We had previously met Alon when he was building his last startup, and we knew he was a special talent. His new idea, inspired by learnings from his last startup, aimed to make GPUs much more efficient by orchestrating AI workloads in a better way, with a specific focus on memory optimization. Given the rabbit hole we were down at the same time, this immediately caught our attention.
Alon would go on to build an incredible team of technologists, including Omer Landau, Ben Chess, and Eyal Salomon. In a short period of time, they did what no one else has done for memory optimization on GPUs – the output and speed of this team’s R&D efforts was nothing short of amazing.
In Crusoe, the Atero team finds a perfect home. Atero will help optimize Crusoe’s inference platform and continue to provide Crusoe with a completely vertical solution for serving AI. We are thrilled for the team on the acquisition, and excited for all they will accomplish in the future. Most importantly, we want to extend a massive thanks to Alon, Omer, and the team for letting us play a small part in this awesome journey.
And last but not least, one person in particular deserves a special shoutout: Roy Katznelson. Roy introduced us to Alon originally and then re-introduced us to Alon when he began building Atero. Thank you, Roy. This journey would not have been possible without you.
Congrats to all involved, most importantly team Atero. We cannot wait to see what comes next!