Granulate

Granulate, an Israeli startup founded in 2018 by Asaf Ezra and Tal Saiag, developed a real-time, continuous application performance optimization service. The founders, both alumni of an elite IDF intelligence unit, leveraged their expertise in operating systems and high-performance computing to address inefficiencies in cloud infrastructure. Ezra, who served as CEO, and Saiag, the CTO, recognized that standard cloud environments were not optimized for specific application workloads, leading to wasted resources and excessive costs. Their journey began with the shared vision of creating an autonomous optimization solution that could learn an application's specific behavior and resource needs to make tailored improvements.

The company's core offering is an agent-based solution that uses machine learning to understand an application's data flows, contention points, and resource usage patterns directly from the operating system kernel. This approach allows Granulate's software to make granular, OS-level scheduling and prioritization decisions, fine-tuning the infrastructure to match the application's precise requirements. The technology operates autonomously in the background, requiring no code changes or manual intervention from development teams, which is a significant differentiator in the Application Performance Management (APM) market. By optimizing runtime environments, the service can significantly improve application latency and throughput.

Granulate's business model is centered on reducing cloud computing expenditures for its clients, which include enterprises and digital-native businesses. The company primarily generates revenue by sharing in the cost savings it delivers, often promising to cut cloud and on-premise compute costs by up to 45%. This value proposition resonated in the market, leading to rapid growth and culminating in a major milestone: its acquisition by Intel in April 2022 for a reported sum of up to $650 million. Following the acquisition, Granulate's technology has been integrated into Intel's software portfolio, now known as Intel® Tiber™ App-Level Optimization, continuing its mission to enhance application performance and deliver substantial cost efficiencies in cloud and data center operations.

Keywords: application performance, cloud cost optimization, real-time optimization, workload management, infrastructure efficiency, autonomous performance, OS-level tuning, Intel acquisition, Asaf Ezra, Tal Saiag