Lenovo has not yet formally completed its Infinidat acquisition. Coincidentally, and sadly, Infinidat founder Moshe Yanai is bankrupt, following insolvency proceedings in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Israeli news outlet Calcalist reports his total debts are estimated to be $120 million. The money is owed to banks, investment funds, non-bank lenders, and personal acquaintances. Yanai’s assets amount to $60 – 70 million, encompassing 4 homes, including a luxury penthouse in Manhattan and a property in Boston, 4 vehicles, and various investment holdings though his Michal International Investments (MII) firm.
MII is now controlled by the Scintilla Fund, Yanai’s largest creditor, which claims it’s owed $42 million.
Yanai said these holdings were worth around $1.1 billion, in March 2025 and based on a US Court ruling. The Tel Aviv court disagreed and declared him bankrupt in October last year. It emerged that he owed between $10 million and $20 million to his acquaintances and friends and $8 million to an Executive Helicopters business. The family of Professor Yair Taumann, an economist and former Bank Hapoalim director, also wants about $7.5 million in loans it made repaid.
The Tauman family contributed a total of $6.1 million since 2019 to MII, and said Yanai was personally behind the MII fund but didn’t provide any documented guarantee as personal trust was thought to be good enough. A Tauman family court filing stated: “The entire negotiation was conducted directly with Yanai, … Yanai made it clear repeatedly that, despite the agreement being signed with MII, he was personally behind it. He even said explicitly, ‘The company is only for tax purposes, it’s actually me.’”
The filing alleges that Yanai “took advantage of the trust placed in him, defrauded them, and used their money for his own needs … he appears to have deceived the family from the outset and has been rolling other people’s money for years.”
When Lenovo agreed to buy Infinidat in January 2025, the Tauman family wanted its loans repaid by MII. They were not. The Tel Aviv court has appointed Boaz Toshav to manage the MII fund on behalf of Scintilla. He says Yanai’s proceeds from the Infinidat sale will only total about $3.5 million, $2.6 million less than the Taufman claim.
The court appointed an attorney, Yariv Shay Yashinovsky, as a trustee to liquidate Yanai’s assets and deliver cash to his creditors. The Manhattan penthouse is going for sale at $6.86 million.
Calcalist says that Harvard professor and game theory scholar Elon Kohlberg asked to join the insolvency proceedings claiming he is owed up to $2 million from a decade-old agreement tied to Infinidat’s sale to Lenovo. He “had previously purchased Infinidat stock options from Yanai for $1 million. According to documents submitted to the court, Yanai promised that Kohlberg would receive $2 million, twice his original investment, if the company was sold.”
In October last year a Yanai representative told Calcalist: “Following the war in October 2023, a major deal involving one of Mr. Yanai’s portfolio companies was canceled, and additional transactions were delayed or frozen. To preserve these startups and their employees, loans were secured against private assets. All loans were used solely to fund company operations, as verified by an EY report submitted to the court. The financial difficulty is purely a cash-flow issue stemming from the security situation. With the realization of certain assets in the coming months, the matter is expected to be fully resolved.”
We have asked Lenovo if the Infinidat acquisition is being delayed by Yanai’s bankruptcy.
All-in-all, this is a most regrettable and sad fall from grace by one of the foremost, if not the foremost, storage technology and business builders alive today. Yanai is quite simply a storage legend.
Update 9 January
A Lenovo spokesperson said: “Lenovo is unable to comment on matters not directly linked to the transaction, so will not be providing any further statement at this time.”
Bootnote
Moshe Yanai is a renowned storage industry veteran. In 2017 we wrote: “He is a one-time Israeli Defence Force commander, a Technion University graduate and now Distinguished Fellow, an ex-EMC fellow, an ex-IBM fellow, a man who inspires extraordinary loyalty and is rumored to have had volcanic strategy disagreements with the most senior corporate storage business executives.
“His Symmetrix high-end array was the single most important product in EMC’s history, catapulting the company to unparalleled dominance as a standalone storage supplier, and is still in production today as the VMAX system.”
He retired from EMC in 2001, and then “funded and chaired Israeli startup XIV to develop the Nextra storage system that was simpler to manage than Symmetrix but as performant and reliable by using a grid of connected x86 servers, each with their own disk drives. …XIV, its 50 employees and Yanai were acquired by IBM in January 2008 for a rumoured $200–300m.”
Yanai left IBM in 2010. He started up Diligent with CEO Doron Kempel in 2002, and its ProtecTIER deduplication technology was OEM’d by Overland Storage, HDS and Sun. IBM bought it for a rumored $200 million in 2008. Kempel went on to found HCI startup Simplivity which HPE acquired for $650 million in 2017.
Moshe Yanai joined company boards and set up the Tel Aviv Executive Helicopters taxi service, being qualified as a pilot.
He founded Infinidat in 2010, and its Infinibox systems technology uses memory data caching to supply data from disk as fast if not faster than all-flash arrays. Yanai was ejected as CEO by chairman Boaz Chalamish in May 2020, becoming its Chief Technology Evangelist. In October 2020, there was a funding round necessitated by a difficult Covid pandemic and post-pandemic period. Yanai was also then sued by 29 current and former employees for wrongfully diluting their shares in the company. At that point he left Infinidat, and was replaced as Infinidat CEO by ex-Western Digital exec Phil Bullinger in January 2021.
