The company was founded in 2005 by CEO Benny Schnaider, with Rami Tamir as president,
Moshe Bar as CTO, and chairman
Giora Yaron. The
Ra'anana-based company developed a virtualization technology for IT data centers. From a very low-profile Israeli startup the company made waves with the rapid acceptance of
KVM into the
Linux kernel, and their
Solid ICE desktop virtualization platform has received serious attention.
Avi Kivity was the lead developer and maintainer of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine project from mid-2006, that has been part of the Linux kernel since the 2.6.20 release in February 2007. Qumranet was on the
Gartner Group's 2008 list of "Cool Vendors," an award given to small companies with advanced technology. On September 4, 2008, Qumranet was acquired by
Red Hat, Inc. for $107 million. ==Key executives==