Dean Leitersdorf

Origins and early life

Dean Leitersdorf is an Israeli computer scientist, co-founder and chief executive of Decart. He finished secondary school in two years and started a computer science degree at the Technion at seventeen while waiting to be called up; he took all three of his degrees there and defended his doctorate at twenty-three, then the youngest in the institution's history, with a thesis on distributed computing that won the ACM PODC Dissertation Award, followed by a postdoctoral year at the National University of Singapore.

Work and career

He served in Unit 8200, where he met Moshe Shalev, and the two registered Decart in Tel Aviv on 7 September 2023; a month later both were called up as reservists and stayed in uniform for months while the company took its first steps. Decart works on two fronts: making artificial intelligence models run several times faster on the chips that already exist, whether Nvidia, Google or Amazon, and generating video in real time.

Its first release, Oasis, is a playable open world drawn frame by frame by a model rather than by a game engine; it reached a million users in three days. In May 2026 the company raised three hundred million dollars at a valuation of about four billion, taking the total raised past four hundred and fifty million. In August 2026 the press reported advanced talks for Anthropic to buy Decart for six to seven billion dollars, mostly in shares; as this is written neither company has confirmed anything and nothing has been signed.