Runway Q&A: Concertio

Concertio, a Runway Startup at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, aims to optimize hardware- and software-system-tuning using AI-powered tools that work in concert with currently running workloads.

Learn more about Concertio in this Q&A with co-founder and CEO Tomer Morad.

What does your company do?

Concertio provides AI-powered performance optimization tools that boost the performance of a computing system by tailoring the many system settings (in processors, firmware, OS, and applications) to the running workloads. Our tools are used by the likes of Intel, Marvell, and Mellanox to boost the performance of a multitude of devices and applications.

How has the Jacobs Institute’s Runway program helped you to develop your company?

The Runway program, like its name, provided us with the “runway” we needed to develop deep and risky technology and apply it to real-world applications. Thanks to the guidance, mentoring, and a pre-seed investment provided by the program, we now have a working deep-tech product and paying customers.

What impact do you hope your company will have in the industry/world?

We’re in an era where there’s an ever-growing thirst for computing capacity, driven by new and exciting applications such as AI. The pace of improvements in process technology, however, can barely keep up with this trend, so general-purpose computing systems will need to become more efficient. This will be our impact: our technology will allow these systems to self-tune and adapt to their current workloads in real time, thereby providing performance that is closer to special-purpose systems but achieved on general-purpose systems.

Where did you earn your Ph.D. and what was your research focus?

I earned my Ph.D. at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. My research focused on computer architecture, and I’ve researched how to provide higher performance and higher energy efficiency in resource-constrained computing systems.  

Why did you want to commercialize that research? What was the inspiration behind your company?

My Ph.D. research is not directly commercialized, but rather it served as the inspiration for Concertio. In my career as a hardware and software engineer, as well as in my research, I’ve come to notice that tuning systems is a very difficult task. In the industry, system tuning is important for achieving higher performance and energy efficiency. In academia, system tuning is imperative for evaluating whether new ideas have merit or whether their benefits will disappear in tuned systems. Since machine learning algorithms were already efficient and accurate enough to run in parallel to workloads, I thought it would be technically possible to build a dynamic tuning software product.

Why did you apply to the Runway program?

Applying to the Runway program was a natural choice for me, as I already had startup experience and was looking for the next big thing after finishing my Ph.D. Knowing how difficult it is to start and run a startup, I viewed the benefits of the Runway program as too great to ignore.

What has been the biggest challenge switching your mindset from a researcher/academic to an entrepreneur?

For me, the challenge has been the other way around: how can I possibly reach the finish line with my Ph.D. with all these ideas running in my head?!