Israeli unicorn Decart raises $300m in funding round backed by NVIDIA and Amazon
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and the family behind Nintendo and also among those investing in the fast-growing startup developing real-time AI infrastructure for gaming, media and robotics
Israeli AI startup Decart has raised $300 million in a new funding round that values the company at $4 billion, cementing its position as one of Israel’s fastest-growing AI unicorns.
Founded in 2023 by former Unit 8200 veterans Dr Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, Decart develops infrastructure and so-called “world models” that allow artificial intelligence systems to generate and respond to video, simulations and virtual environments in real time.
The round was led by Radical Ventures and included new backing from NVIDIA, alongside investments from Adobe Ventures, Toyota Ventures, eBay Ventures, Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Zeev Ventures also participated.
High-profile individual investors in the round include AI researcher and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, members of Nintendo’s founding Yamauchi family and gaming investor Moritz Baier-Lentz.
The funding marks another major leap for the Tel Aviv-based company, founded by former Unit 8200 veterans Dr Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev. Decart has now raised more than $450 million in total after securing $100 million last year at a $3.1 billion valuation.
Alongside the investment, Decart announced strategic partnerships with both NVIDIA and Amazon, with Amazon joining as a strategic customer. Under the collaboration, Amazon cloud customers will be able to use Decart’s technology for AI applications spanning media, commerce, advertising and robotics.
The startup is positioning itself at the centre of the race to build “world models” – AI systems capable of generating interactive digital environments and simulations in real time. Its technology is designed to support next-generation AI applications that continuously respond to users and changing surroundings.
At the heart of the company’s offering is DOS 2.0, Decart’s upgraded optimisation infrastructure, which the company says dramatically improves the speed and cost efficiency of AI processing across NVIDIA GPUs, Google TPUs and Amazon Trainium chips.
According to Decart, the platform delivers more than 1,600 tokens per second for agentic AI inference – far above current industry norms – while enabling real-time video and world-model generation at up to 100 frames per second.
The company says its infrastructure can reduce AI processing costs from thousands of dollars to less than 25 cents per hour in some applications. Decart has also claimed profitability almost since launch, generating millions of dollars in revenue through agreements with major cloud providers and AI laboratories using its GPU optimisation technology.
In the coming weeks, the company plans to launch updated versions of its three main products: DOS, its optimisation stack; Lucy, a real-time interactive video model aimed at gaming, advertising and immersive experiences; and Oasis, a world model focused on robotics and physical AI simulations.
The funding round also drew a number of prominent individual investors, including Andrej Karpathy, former Michael Eisner, members of the Nintendo founding Yamauchi family and gaming investor Moritz Baier-Lentz.
Decart’s rapid rise reflects growing international investor confidence in Israeli AI innovation, particularly in infrastructure technologies aimed at lowering the cost and increasing the speed of large-scale artificial intelligence systems.
decart.ai
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