Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS) announced that Clarifai's core engineering and research team, led by founder and CEO Matthew Zeiler, is joining the AI cloud company. Nebius has also agreed to license Clarifai's inference and compute orchestration technology.

Zeiler, a machine learning pioneer who has worked with researchers including Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, will join Nebius as Senior Vice President of Research. He will lead a team focused on 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 the company.

The transaction is designed to strengthen Nebius Token Factory as a full-stack inference platform following the company's recently announced acquisition of Eigen AI. While Eigen AI optimizes at the model level, Clarifai's technology optimizes the system, according to the company.

Nebius will acquire Clarifai's patent portfolio covering AI inference, compute orchestration, and related technologies. The company will receive a non-exclusive, perpetual license to Clarifai's AI inference and reasoning technology stack.

The license is limited to Clarifai's modern AI inference and compute orchestration technology. It does not include Clarifai's legacy computer vision models or 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, according to the company statement.