Israeli startup Decart is about to be acquired by Anthropic, producer of the AI assistant Claude, according to a report by Bloomberg. The deal will be AI giant Anthropic’s first in Israel. Up to now, Anthropic has operated in the Israeli market mainly through sales representatives based in Ireland. Decart, founded in 2023 by Dr. Dean Leitersdorf (CEO) and Moshe Shalev (CPO) and based in Tel Aviv, which also conducted negotiations on a sale to Nvidia, now appears to be on its way to a huge exit.
If a deal with Anthropic goes ahead, it will turn the Israeli founders into millionaires and generate a handsome return for some Decart’s investors: Oren Zeev’s Zeev Ventures, Israeli-American private venture capital investor Tilli Kalisky-Bannett, and the Sequoia and Benchmark venture capital firms. Other prominent names among Decart’s investors are Andrej Karpathy, one of the founders of OpenAI, advisor to the prime minister Michael Eisenberg, through Aleph VC, and Yossi Sariel, who was the commander of signals intelligence unit 8200 at the time of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
The founders realized that they had to sell
What has led Anthropic to pay five or six billion dollars for a company founded only three years ago? The most important element is perhaps the realization that dawned on Decart’s founders and investors that they needed to sell the company. Decart developed graphic language models for gaming and 3D, but these struggled to generate stable revenue for the company, leading to introduce frequent product changes. Its main revenue came from another, more basic product that improves processing efficiency of language models on graphics processors, an important feature for the launch stage, that is operation of the language models after they have been trained. This product is sold to AI labs. All along, Decart had to spend tens of millions of dollars on hiring computing resources, graphics processors, and space at server farms.
There is considerable synergy that makes the emerging deal logical. Anthropic brings to it not just language and inference models, chiefly in coding and operating AI agents, it also has a huge market, with the biggest market share in coding.
Decart’s models are especially effective in robotics, in what Nvidia calls "physical AI." This is a growing market that includes manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, autonomous weapons, and humanoid robots. Decart’s models, which are capable of making decisions, planning tasks, analyzing the environment, and understanding language, could help Anthropic to enter areas in which it is not currently dominant and compete with Elon Musk’s X.ai, which is used in aviation and space, and Google’s DeepMind.
A reason that Anthropic is prepared to pay handsomely for the Israeli company is its optimization engine, the original technology developed by the company, which improves the efficiency of training and testing models not just on Nvidia processors but also on competing processors such as Google’s TPU, and Amazon’s Trainium, developed by Israeli company Annapurna Labs. This product will enable Anthropic to appeal to enterprises that operate on a variety of processors and to provide them with what they seek above all: to reduce AI computing costs, the price per token, and the latency in complex processing such as video, audio, and 3D.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 13, 2026.
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