Orian Leitersdorf

Origins and early life

Orian Leitersdorf is an Israeli computer engineer, chief scientist of Decart and the younger brother of its chief executive, Dean. He took his bachelor's, master's and doctorate in electrical and computer engineering at the Technion and became the youngest person ever to complete a doctorate there, taking the record from Dean, who had held it since defending at twenty-three.

Work and career

His research is on digital processing-in-memory: doing the arithmetic inside the memory chips themselves instead of carrying the data back and forth to a processor, which is where much of the time and energy of a large computation is spent. He published AritPIM on high-throughput in-memory arithmetic, PyPIM to make the technique reachable from ordinary Python tensors, and DART-PIM, which applies it to mapping DNA reads.

He joined Decart in 2025 as chief scientist and the press now counts him among its founders. In August 2026 the press reported advanced talks for Anthropic to buy the company for six to seven billion dollars; as this is written neither company has confirmed anything and nothing has been signed.