Decart AI

The Leitersdorf brothers and Moshe Shalev: the three founders

Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev met during their service in Unit 8200, the IDF's technological intelligence unit, and officially registered Decart in September 2023. Dean, born in Israel and raised in Switzerland and California, completed a bachelor's, a master's and a PhD in computer science at the Technion by age 23 and won an ACM doctoral dissertation award. Shalev grew up in an ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) family in Bnei Brak and served in 8200 through an enlistment track for Haredi recruits. Later Orian Leitersdorf, Dean's younger brother, also joined the founders. He broke his brother's age record himself when he completed a PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the Technion at 22, and he serves as the company's chief scientist. Israeli media have described the three founders as three of the most prominent minds to emerge from the local tech industry in recent years.

Oasis: a million users in three days

The product that made Decart a known name is Oasis, a world model launched in November 2024. It lets users create and explore a virtual environment that is generated in real time, frame by frame, with no classic game engine behind it. According to reports, the product gained a million users within three days of its launch and for a while jumped above ChatGPT in the download charts. Alongside Oasis, the company also developed Lucy, a model for real-time video editing and generation designed for interactive experiences. Both products show Decart's main direction: not only to create impressive visual content, but to do it fast enough that the user can interact with it live, unlike the wait-based video generation that most competing tools offer.

DOS: making real-time AI cheaper

Beyond the generative models themselves, Decart presents its software layer, DOS, as a tool that improves how existing AI hardware is actually used. It lets heavy models run on fewer chips and at a lower cost per hour of running time. The company claims the improvement sometimes reaches 100 times in cost and 8 times in speed compared with similar systems on exactly the same hardware. This ability has also made Decart a technology supplier for larger players in the industry, not only a maker of an end product of its own. According to the company's announcement, its customers and investors also include chip and cloud giants that see its optimization technology as a way to lower their operating costs.

The funding path: from $100 million to $300 million in less than a year

Decart's pace of fundraising is considered unusual even for the booming AI industry. In August 2025 the company raised $100 million in what was its third round in just 11 months, at a valuation of $3.1 billion, with funds such as Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Zeev Ventures taking part. In May 2026 came another, larger round: $300 million led by Radical Ventures, with NVIDIA joining as a new investor alongside Adobe Ventures and Toyota Ventures, at a valuation of about $4 billion. According to the company's announcement, its total funding since its founding rose above $450 million. Notably, the company itself claimed that until then it had used less than $10 million of investors' money, because it paid for its computing costs from ongoing revenue.

The acquisition talks with Anthropic, and walking away from them

In mid-August 2026 Bloomberg, followed by other media outlets, reported that Anthropic was in talks to acquire Decart. A report from 13 August described early-stage talks at an estimated value of about $6 billion that could still fall apart. A few days later, on 16–17 August, Calcalist published a report that described the talks as more advanced: close to signing, at an estimated value of about $7 billion, mostly paid in Anthropic shares rather than cash. But this report also stressed explicitly that the deal had not yet been signed and could still fall apart. Interestingly, NVIDIA, which had earlier been in exclusive talks to acquire Decart and had even taken part in its latest funding round as an investor, dropped out of the race to acquire it after a larger bidder joined. On 8 September 2026 Bloomberg reported, citing sources who asked to remain anonymous, that Anthropic had decided not to acquire Decart after completing due diligence, and that the two might still cooperate in other ways. Representatives of both companies declined to comment. According to The Next Web, what interested Anthropic was mainly Decart's software layer for making better use of chips, not its world models. The reports do not make clear whether the decision to walk away came from the price or from something found in the due diligence.

An Israeli company headquartered in San Francisco

Legally, Decart is an American company, Decart.AI Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, where part of its senior team is also based; according to its website it also has an office in New York. But its two main founders are Israeli, their formative meeting happened in an Israeli military unit, and according to reports a large part of the company's engineering staff sits in Tel Aviv and in northern Israel. Under the geographic rule commonly used in this category, a company whose development center is in Israel counts as Israeli even if it is legally registered outside Israel. So Decart counts as an Israeli company. This is also how the Israeli business press treats it, presenting it as one of the most prominent stories of the local AI industry in the past two years.