Anthropic reportedly in talks to buy Israeli-founded AI startup at $6B valuation

Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for The Times of Israel

Founded only three years ago, Israeli artificial intelligence startup Decart is reportedly in talks to be acquired by American AI giant and Claude chatbot developer Anthropic for as much as $6 billion.

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The talks — which have not been finalized and could still fall through — were first reported by Bloomberg. If the deal comes to fruition, it would mark Anthropic’s first acquisition in Israel, and its largest to date. Started by a group of former OpenAI researchers in 2021, Anthropic is the developer of so-called large language models or LLMs, the advanced AI technology behind conversational chatbots such as Claude AI or ChatGPT.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment, and Decart declined to do so. Meanwhile, Elon Musk dismissed a report by Israeli financial daily Calcalist that SpaceX was in talks to buy Decart. Previously, US chip giant Nvidia was reportedly vying to purchase the Israeli AI startup.

Decart was founded in late 2023 by 27-year-old Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, who connected during their military service in Israel’s military intelligence unit 8200.

Decart has built a software platform to train massive, real-time generative AI models across Nvidia, Amazon and Google processors. The platform is designed to optimize the utility of chips needed for training and running AI models. The technology cuts the computing cost of training AI models by helping chips work more efficiently, according to the startup.

Advanced AI systems are trained using huge amounts of data which require both ultra-fast computing performance and massive memory.

The addition of Decart’s technology could help Anthropic handle increasing demand for its AI tools such as Claude, according to the Bloomberg report. AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI have both committed to spending billions of dollars on data centers equipped with expensive chips to meet their soaring computing needs to build and run advanced AI systems.

Decart is also building generative AI foundation models that vow to turn human imagination into video on the screen without the need for extensive coding. The advanced AI system, which aims to simulate the physical world, lets users edit and navigate live video feeds during streaming or recording, using text prompts to change colors, outfits, scene environment, or remove objects.

The video simulation technology lets online shoppers drag and drop garments to try on a dress and see how it looks on them in real time; gamers can swap characters and change sceneries while they play video games.

Decart is betting that its models, which are designed to generate simulated environments, will be used to better train and test humanoid robots, and autonomous-driving systems. With offices in Tel Aviv, New York, and San Francisco, the startup employs 106 people, out of which 89 are based in Israel.

In May, Decart raised $300 million at a valuation of about $4 billion in a funding round led by Radical Ventures. Nvidia and other investors including Atreides Management, Valor Equity, Adobe Ventures, Toyota Ventures and eBay Ventures also participated alongside existing backers Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Zeev Ventures.

The startup’s individual investors include OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, the Nintendo family and gaming investor Moritz Baier-Lentz. To date, Decart has raised more than $450 million in funds.

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