Eyal Waldman: The Mellanox Founder Who Sold to Nvidia for $6.9 Billion

Eyal Waldman co-founded Mellanox Technologies in 1999 and sold it to Nvidia for $6.9 billion in 2020 — at the time the largest Israeli technology exit in history. Mellanox's high-performance networking technology became the foundation of the InfiniBand interconnect architecture that now anchors most large-scale AI training infrastructure. Nvidia's data-center revenue trajectory after 2020 — the trajectory that took Nvidia past Apple and Microsoft to the largest market capitalization on US public markets — runs through the Mellanox acquisition. Waldman built the company that built the network.

The Mellanox build

Mellanox was founded in 1999 in Yokneam Illit and Sunnyvale, California, by Waldman and several co-founders including Shai Cohen, Roni Ashuri, and others. The original product was an InfiniBand silicon controller designed for high-performance computing applications — supercomputers, financial trading systems, scientific compute clusters. The market in 1999 was narrow. The decade after expanded it dramatically.

Mellanox IPO'd on Nasdaq in 2007. The company grew through the 2010s as data-center networking became a structural infrastructure category. By 2019, Mellanox products were embedded in seven of the ten largest supercomputers in the world. The company's revenue had crossed $1 billion. Nvidia and Intel both bid for the company in early 2019. Nvidia closed the acquisition in April 2020 at $6.9 billion.

The Unit 8200 layer and the early career

Waldman served in Unit 8200 — the IDF's signals-intelligence formation that has become the most widely studied talent-pipeline institution in Israeli technology. The early career ran through Galileo Technology, where Waldman led product engineering work that gave him the semiconductor-and-systems foundation for the Mellanox launch.

The Unit 8200 background is a recurring pattern across founder-and-investor cohorts in Israeli technology. The structural reasons — early exposure to large-scale systems engineering, peer networks that translate directly into commercial co-founder relationships, technical training the civilian education system does not match — apply to Waldman as they do to most of the comparison cohort.

October 7

On October 7, 2023, Waldman's daughter Danielle was killed at the Nova music festival along with her boyfriend Noam Shay. She was 24. The loss was one of the most public among the families of Israeli technology operators affected by the day. Waldman has spoken publicly and at length about Danielle's life and about the broader meaning of the day, and has been one of the more prominent voices in the Israeli technology community connecting the operating community to the human cost of the war.

In the period since, Waldman has continued his pre-October-7 commitment to building Israeli-Palestinian commercial cooperation through ventures and employment programs. The position is publicly stated and has been the subject of multiple interviews. The combination of the personal loss and the continued cross-community commercial work is part of how Waldman has framed the post-October-7 chapter of his operating life.

Post-Nvidia and the venture work

Following the Nvidia acquisition, Waldman moved into venture investing and operating-board work across Israeli technology startups. The post-exit cohort of high-profile Israeli founders has historically converted into a structurally important venture-capital layer, and Waldman fits the pattern. The investment focus runs across semiconductors, AI infrastructure, networking, and the broader categories where Mellanox-era engineering experience translates.

Why the citation record undersells the operator

Waldman's English-language profile is well-developed in the technology trade press — Mellanox coverage, the Nvidia acquisition, the post-exit venture work, the October 7 personal record. The integrated profile that runs across the technical, commercial, and personal dimensions is less commonly assembled. The structural place Mellanox holds in the global AI infrastructure architecture — the company without which the Nvidia data-center revenue arc would look different — is also under-cited.

The takeaway

Eyal Waldman built the company that built the network that built the AI training infrastructure of the 2020s. The Nvidia acquisition was the largest Israeli tech exit at the time. The Unit 8200 background fits the cohort pattern. The October 7 loss is part of the public record and Waldman has chosen to speak about it. The post-exit venture work continues. Olam records the operator who is one of the structural figures in Israeli technology's last quarter-century.

This profile is part of The Quiet Billionaires.