Asaf Somekh

Co-Founder and Leader, Iguazio – McKinsey’s AI platform, QuantumBlack McKinsey & Company

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Asaf Somekh is a serial Israeli technology entrepreneur who has spent more than thirty years in data infrastructure and, latterly, artificial intelligence. He co-founded Iguazio in 2014 and ran it as Chief Executive Officer for nearly a decade, building an MLOps platform aimed at the gap between a model that works in a notebook and a model that runs reliably in production. McKinsey & Company acquired the company in January 2023 – reported in Israeli press at around $50 million – and folded it into QuantumBlack, its AI arm. Somekh stayed, and now leads the Iguazio platform from Herzliya as part of McKinsey’s enterprise AI and generative AI delivery capability. His career before Iguazio ran through a distinctive slice of the Israeli technology sector: a succession of infrastructure companies – Voltaire, XtremIO, XIV, Mellanox, Radvision – each of which ended in an acquisition by a much larger player.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Iguazio in 2014 and served as its CEO until the McKinsey acquisition closed in 2023.
• Led the company through its acquisition by McKinsey & Company, announced January 2023 and reported at approximately $50 million.
• Now Co-Founder and Leader of Iguazio within QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm, based in Herzliya, Israel.
• Helped position Iguazio’s platform as the engine McKinsey uses to help enterprises develop, deploy and manage AI and generative AI applications at scale.
• Held senior executive roles at Voltaire, which listed on NASDAQ in 2007 and was later acquired by Mellanox.
• Held senior roles at XtremIO (acquired by EMC), XIV (acquired by IBM), Mellanox (acquired by Nvidia) and Radvision (acquired by Avaya).
• Began his career as a software manager at APTEL in 1994, and has since worked across R&D, marketing and business development in both startups and public companies.

Professional Journey

Somekh entered the industry in 1994 as a software manager at APTEL and spent the following two decades moving between Israeli infrastructure companies, crossing functions as he went – research and development, marketing, business development – and working in both early-stage startups and public corporations. That breadth is a recurring feature of his own account of his career: he has described himself less as a specialist in any one discipline than as someone comfortable across the whole span from engineering to go-to-market.

The companies themselves form an unusually consistent pattern. Voltaire, the InfiniBand networking company, floated on NASDAQ in 2007 and was subsequently acquired by Mellanox. XtremIO, the flash storage array startup, was acquired by EMC. XIV, the grid storage company, went to IBM. Mellanox itself was eventually acquired by Nvidia, and Radvision by Avaya. Somekh held senior positions across this group, giving him direct experience of the Israeli build-and-exit model at close range.

In 2014, following the Voltaire exit, he co-founded Iguazio – one of four co-founders – and took the chief executive role. The company’s premise was that enterprises were hitting a wall not in building machine learning models but in operating them: getting data pipelines, feature stores, deployment and monitoring to work together reliably enough that a model could serve a real business process. Iguazio built an MLOps platform to close that gap, and open-sourced core components of it, which gave the technology reach well beyond its direct customer base.

McKinsey announced its acquisition of Iguazio in January 2023, adding the platform to QuantumBlack. The logic of the deal ran both ways: McKinsey gained production-grade AI tooling to back its advisory work rather than relying wholly on client infrastructure, and Iguazio gained distribution into large enterprises that McKinsey already served. Somekh did not treat the acquisition as an exit from operating responsibility. He continues to lead the Iguazio platform inside QuantumBlack from Herzliya, with the product now positioned around helping enterprises rapidly develop, deploy and manage AI and generative AI applications at scale.

Education

IMD (International Institute for Management Development)

MBA, Business Administration, around 2000

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

BSc, Computer Engineering