Israeli AI company Decart has raised $300mn in a new funding round less than a year after its previous raise, lifting its valuation to $4bn, according to a new filing in Tel Aviv on May 19.

The funding brings the tech start-up's total capital raised to over $450mn making the Israeli tech firm one of the fastest growing in the sector and attracting foreign investment to the country. 

The round was led by Radical Ventures and included chip giant NVIDIA as both investor and strategic partner. Additional participants included eBay Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Toyota Ventures, Atreides Management, and Valor Equity Partners, alongside returning investors Sequoia Capital, Zeev Ventures, and Benchmark, Israeli financial paper Calcalist reported. 

Private investors in the round include Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, former Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner, members of the Nintendo founding family, and gaming investor Moritz Baier-Lentz.

Founded in late 2023 by Dr Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev,  both veterans of Israel Defense Forces elite Unit 8200,  Decart was originally built around reducing the processing costs of large language models. 

The company has since expanded into three revenue streams: an optimisation service that reduces reliance on NVIDIA processors by increasing compute efficiency; a model development service delivered via API to enterprise customers through their existing cloud infrastructure; and a video generation product line, which includes the Oasis and Mirage video generators.

A third video product, Lucy, a real-time interactive video model with gaming applications, is set to launch in the coming weeks alongside updated versions of its core product lines, Globes noted.

The funding follows the signing of strategic partnerships with Amazon and NVIDIA. Under the Amazon agreement, enterprise customers will be able to deploy Decart's technology across media, commerce, advertising, and physical AI applications. The company said it is already generating revenue through contracts with several of the world's largest cloud providers, AI laboratories, and hyperscale companies.

Decart has positioned itself around what it calls "world models", which are systems designed to simulate and generate interactive digital environments. The Israeli company plans to extend its product lines into simulations, robotics, and audio.

NVIDIA's dual role as investor and business partner, combined with Amazon Web Services as a strategic customer, gives the company unusually high institutional backing for a two-year-old laboratory, and signals that its infrastructure play in real-time AI is attracting serious commercial validation.