Israel's $2 trillion CTO

• Published date: 21 April 2024
• Author: Nevo Trabelsy
• Publication title: Globes (Rishon LeZion, Israel)

"Mellanox was founded in the old building of the Soltam factory in Yokneam, before the city's tech park became what it is today," he recollects. "We even brought chairs from home. The doors of the old rooms, together with some computer cases, served us as desks. There was a pioneering spirit. A 'startup in the garage' story in the full sense of the word. Eyal Waldman (Mellanox founder) was in the US most of the time in efforts to raise funds for the company's activities, while his partners, Roni Ashuri and Shai Cohen, hired the first engineers of the early stage company, and within a few months the number of employees increased to 40."

At that time, Kagan was mainly involved in the development of Mellanox's first product - a communications processor: "We called it by the code name 'Gamla'. Today it is the name of the restaurant in our offices in Yokneam. We worked very hard, and like any startup, there were ups and downs. Not everything was rosy. But in every crisis we encountered, we didn't give up. We believed in our potential and the products we developed. From there, we began to take off."

Did you believe that you would go as far as you did?

"Already with the founding of Mellanox, our dream was to build a large and successful Israeli tech company, and that's what we did. I had confidence in our path, even when it was crooked and not easy. Along the way, we made several significant acquisitions in Israel, which helped bring Mellanox to its peak, alongside organic growth."

"We brought the technology spaceship to Israel"

Kagan (67) is one of the most senior Israelis in the field of generative AI. He was born in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg) in the then Soviet Union and in 1975, when he was just 18, he immigrated to Israel after being rejected by a top Russian university because of his Jewish name. In Israel he studied electric engineering at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and financed his studies by working as a cleaner. Today he sits on the Technion's board of directors.

After his studies and his military service he worked for Intel Israel for 16 years, becoming chief architect, leading the development of chips. In 1999 on the way to hospital to take his wife to give birth, he received an offer from Waldman to help his set up Mellanox.

In 2019, just three years after it had founded its first development center in Israel, Nvidia announced it was buying Mellanox for $7 billion in one of the largest-ever acquisitions of an Israeli company. The deal was completed in 2020 and Mellanox's 2,000 employees joined Nvidia. At the time of the acquisition, Mellanox had annual revenue of $1.5 billion, while today the annual revenue of the networking technology that Mellanox is responsible for is $13 billion.

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