Sequoia-backed Decart raises $21M in Seed funding to pioneer scalable, cost-efficient GenAI
The Israeli startup has built an AI infrastructure platform that enhances the efficiency of AI models, offering faster and more reliable training as well as real-time inference.
Israeli startup Decart has raised $21 million in a Seed round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Oren Zeev, who was one of the company's first investors shortly after its founding last year.
Full list of Israeli high-tech funding rounds in 2024
Decart has built an AI infrastructure platform that enhances the efficiency of AI models, offering faster and more reliable training as well as real-time inference. Leveraging these capabilities, Decart is now training AI foundation models to create new generative AI experiences.
The company was established in late 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf (CEO) and Moshe Shalev (CPO). Moshe previously held key technological positions within the Intelligence Division, including in Unit 8200. Dean, also a veteran of Unit 8200, completed his doctoral studies in computer science at the Technion by the age of 23 while still in military service. Upon their discharge, the two began building an AI lab to address significant challenges in the field of artificial intelligence.
According to Decart, its platform enables organizations to train massive AI models at scale while significantly reducing training costs and improving efficiency tenfold. Within just a few months of launching, Decart achieved early profitability, securing paying enterprise customers and generating millions in revenue. Decart is based in Tel Aviv and currently employs 25 people.
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"Decart’s journey has been unconventional from the outset—and we are executing a game-changing platform that maximizes AI training efficiency for organizations," said Dean Leitersdorf, Co-Founder and CEO of Decart. "With this new funding, we take our vision to the next level – doubling down on our business momentum and technical expertise to usher in a new era of generative experiences and unlock possibilities that were once only imagined."
Amid its launch, Decart unveils its first generative experience model - an interactive AI video game that operates ten times more efficiently than traditional AI models. This model represents one of the first fully playable world models in GenAI history, introducing a new form of human-AI interaction and enabling players to create a playable gaming experience with minimal latency. Typically, such models require tens of millions of dollars for training and even more for deployment at scale, but Decart's technological capabilities across the entire AI stack have made this achievement possible as an early-stage startup.
