Nebius Adds Clarifai Engineering Team, Licenses Inference Tech
AMSTERDAM, May 14, 2026 — Nebius has announced that the core engineering and research team from Clarifai, led by founder and CEO Matthew Zeiler, is joining Nebius. Nebius has also agreed to license Clarifai’s inference and compute orchestration technology.
The transaction will further strengthen Nebius Token Factory as a full-stack inference platform following Nebius’s recently announced acquisition of Eigen AI. While Eigen AI optimizes at the model level, Clarifai’s technology optimizes the system, creating the end-to-end infrastructure required to run complex AI models reliably in production.
Clarifai founder and CEO Matthew Zeiler – a recognized pioneer in machine learning who has worked alongside researchers including Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Dean, Rob Fergus, and Yann LeCun – will join Nebius as SVP, Research. At Nebius, he will lead a team focused on frontier AI innovation across areas including multimodal agentic reasoning, world models, token efficiency, and long-term memory.
A select group of Clarifai engineers and researchers will also join Nebius’s infrastructure teams, bringing more than a decade of expertise in inference optimization and machine learning to Nebius.
Roman Chernin, co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Nebius, said: “We are building a complete inference ecosystem, because delivering efficient execution at scale is a system optimization game: model optimization, system design, and compute orchestration all have to work together. The integration of Clarifai’s advanced system-building capabilities and proven team will further strengthen Nebius Token Factory, offering customers the infrastructure they need to run models reliably and cost-effectively in production.”
Alongside the integration of Clarifai’s core engineering and research talent, Nebius will acquire Clarifai’s patent portfolio covering AI inference, compute orchestration, and related technologies, and will receive a non-exclusive, perpetual license to Clarifai’s modern AI inference and reasoning technology stack.
Matthew Zeiler, founder and CEO of Clarifai, said: “The future of AI – from agentic systems to physical AI – depends on the infrastructure powering it. Nebius is building the ultimate foundation to become the next hyperscaler, and I am excited to bring our team’s expertise to that mission and to lead research at the frontier of AI. By combining our deep experience in compute orchestration and system-level optimization with Nebius’s massive compute capacity, we will give developers the jointly optimized hardware and software stack they need to deploy AI at scale.”
The scope of the license is limited to Clarifai’s modern AI inference and compute orchestration technology. It does not include Clarifai’s legacy computer vision models, any intellectual property, products, services, or commercial arrangements associated with Clarifai’s US government and defense programs.
Commercial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
About Nebius
Nebius, the AI cloud company, is building the full-stack platform for developers and companies to take charge of their AI future — from data and model training to production deployment. Founded on deep in-house technological expertise and operating at scale with a rapidly expanding global footprint, Nebius serves startups and enterprises building AI products, agents and services worldwide.
Source: Nebius
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