# Liran Zvibel Named Winner in 2019 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards **Published:** March 18, 2019 **Location:** SAN JOSE, Calif. ![WEKA logo with abstract white shapes on a textured purple to orange gradient background](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ult5g8gw/production/4061da3e03532447a685d4d60928329ecf6bfba7-1200x675.png) > WekaIO CEO Liran Zvibel won a 2019 AI Excellence Award for Matrix, a high-performance file system that accelerates data-intensive AI and machine learning workloads. _Award validates that WekaIO has developed game-changing technology to advance the field of AI_ [WekaIO](https://www.weka.io), the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, today announced that Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO, was named a winner in The Business Intelligence Group’s [Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards](https://www.bintelligence.com/artificial-intelligence-excellence-awards) program. This business awards program set out to recognize those organizations, products and people that bring Artificial Intelligence (AI) to life by delivering innovative solutions to advance and apply it to solve real problems. The company’s flagship product, WekaIO Matrix™ was designed from the ground up to handle the demands of new emerging workloads including machine learning, image processing, technical computing and HPC. Matrix™, accelerates AI workloads in a way that legacy storage systems cannot. By improving data training models on GPU server architecture, Matrix dramatically shortens time to market for complex AI projects. The most acute pain point experienced in AI and machine learning (ML), for the large GPU farms being amassed for ML at scale, are the IO constraints, particularly for inference training. WekaIO Matrix is the only file system that can keep a data-hungry GPU server saturated, and the only file system that can manage billions of files in the same directory. For AI and ML initiatives, the more data available to the training model and the more training Epochs that can be completed in a short amount of time, the better the outcomes. For example, [TuSimple](https://www.weka.io/press-releases/tusimple-selects-parallel-file-system-for-ai/), a leader in autonomous truck technology, has selected the WekaIO Matrix™ HPC storage system to accelerate its deep neural network (DNN) machine learning training. And [TRE ALTAMIRA](https://www.weka.io/resources/case-studies/tre-altamira-case-study), a geospatial modeling company reduced its analytics modeling from 2 weeks down to 2 days, a 7x reduction in the time to value. For these reasons, Zvibel was recognized by The Business Intelligence Group for his contribution to AI innovation by bringing WekaIO Matrix to market. “Since announcing the commercial availability of our flagship product, Matrix, in June 2017, it has been like sitting in the driver’s seat of a rocket ship,” said Zvibel. “Our software is designed to be fundamentally straightforward, and once our AI and ML customers get a taste of the performance, low latency, and simplicity of the Matrix file system, they want to start deploying it for many other business workloads. We are grateful for the validation we receive from award programs like The Business Intelligence Group, as much as we are grateful for the customer validations every day.” “As evidenced by all of the nominations, Artificial Intelligence is set to transform nearly every aspect of our lives and culture,” said Maria Jimenez, chief nominations officer for Business Intelligence Group. “As more and more companies build new tools, launch new services or deploy the AI of strategic vendors, it is important to recognize the truly unique solutions and how they impact the market. We are so proud that such an incredible group of companies won this year’s program.” The Business Intelligence Group was founded with the mission of recognizing true talent and superior performance in the business world. Unlike other industry award programs, these programs are judged by business executives with experience and knowledge. The organization’s proprietary and unique scoring system selectively measures performance across multiple business domains and then rewards those companies and individuals whose achievements stand above those of their peers. For more information go to www.bintelligence.com. ## About WEKA **About WEKA** WEKA is the AI data and memory infrastructure company transforming the economics of agentic AI. Its NeuralMesh™ platform unifies high-performance data storage with extended GPU memory, giving enterprises, AI cloud providers, and AI builders a single foundation for training, inference, and agentic workloads. With Augmented Memory Grid, NeuralMesh extends GPU memory capacity by 1000x, accelerates time to first token by up to 20x, and delivers 10x more concurrent users from the same GPU footprint, proven in production benchmarks. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50, WEKA enables organizations to scale AI faster, optimize GPU utilization, and reduce the cost of every token served. Learn more at [www.weka.io](https://www.weka.io/) or connect with us on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/weka-io/) and [X](https://x.com/weka). _WEKA and the W logo are registered trademarks of WekaIO, Inc. Other trade names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners._ **Media Contact:** WEKA Communications [pr@weka.io](mailto:pr@weka.io) ## More Press Releases - [Backblaze and WEKA Simplify Data Management Across the AI Lifecycle](/news/backblaze-and-weka-simplify-data-management-across-the-ai-lifecycle) - [WEKA and Andromeda Partner to Power AI Workloads at Global Scale](/news/weka-and-andromeda-partner-to-power-ai-workloads-at-global-scale) - [WEKA Unveils WEKApod 3: The World's Densest AI Storage and Memory System for Agentic Workloads](/news/wekapod-3-densest-ai-storage-memory-system) - [WEKA Debuts NeuralMesh 6 to Power Enterprise and Agentic AI Workloads at Production Scale](/news/neuralmesh-6-enterprise-agentic-ai)