The activity of venture capital fund Pitango in Poland has paid off for it. Yesterday, artificial intelligence giant OpenAI bought Polish artificial intelligence company NeptuneAI, in which the first investor was Pitango, the Israeli venture capital fund headed by Chemi Peres and Rami Kalish, together with Polish private equity firm TDJ.
The acquisition price was not disclosed, but in an investment round two years ago the company was valued at $62 million., so that it can be assumed that it was sold at a premium of hundreds of millions of dollars. One of the architects of the acquisition is OpenAI Jakub Pachocki, a native of Gdansk, who replaced Israeli-Canadian Ilya Sutskever after the latter left to found rival company SSI. “Neptune has built a fast, precise system that allows researchers to analyze complex training workflows. We plan to iterate with them to integrate their tools deep into our training stack to expand our visibility into how models learn,” Pachocki said.
To improve GPT code
NeptuneAI, which operates from Warsaw and Palo Alto and employs about 100 people, has developed a tool for checking and resolving problems in the training stage of artificial intelligence models. It collaborated with OpenAI before the acquisition on the development of inspection tools for the development and training of models for OpenAI and its customers, a critical stage in the development of artificial intelligence requiring understanding of models and identification of bugs in the course of complex training processes that can take months.
NeptuneAI founder and CEO Piotr Nied?wied? said, “This is an exciting step for us. We’ve always believed that good tools help researchers do their best work. Joining OpenAI gives us the chance to bring that belief to a new scale.” He is expected to shut down the company’s activity with existing customers and focus on the needs of OpenAI.
The acquisition catches OpenAI during a critical period in which it needs to maintain its standing as the leading provider of artificial intelligence models, which is now challenged by Google’s Gemini, the latest iteration of which, Gemini 3, has won positive reviews and even led Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to declare that he would not go back to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has declared “code red” in an urgent memo to employees to accelerate improvements to ChatGPT.
First investor
Altogether, NeptuneAI has raised $18 million. Among its investors are Madrid and Dubai-based The Lab Ventures and US firm Almaz Capital, one of the partners in which is Yoav Samet, an Israeli who formerly managed Cisco’s venture capital investments. As mentioned, Pitango was the first investor in NeptuneAI in its $2 million seed round in 2018, according to startups database PitchBook.
Pitango made its investment through its Polish investment arm TDJ Pitango Ventures, a partnership with local investment firm TDJ which was co-founded by Daniel Star, an Israeli living in Poland, and with the involvement of Pitango co-founder Rami Kalish. The firm, which changed its name to Full Speed Ventures, is registered in Luxemburg. In the past two years it has expanded its investments in Poland and in other countries in Central and Eastern Europe such as Hungary and the Czech Republic. It relies on government funding from the Polish government development fund PFR for the set-up costs of companies that are two to three times cheaper than in Israel, and on technological manpower that continues to throng to Poland’s technology hubs in Warsaw, Krakow, and Wroclaw. The country has some seventy universities with exact science faculties. The firm encourages the companies to incorporate in the US state of Delaware, the UK, or Singapore, with their intellectual property held in the US.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on December 4, 2025.
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