A young startup that emerged from stealth less than two months ago with big-name backers and bigger ambitions to make a splash in the world of AI is returning to the spotlight.
Decart is building what its CEO and co-founder Dean Leitersdorf describes as “a fully vertically integrated AI research lab,” alongside enterprise and consumer products based on the lab’s work. Its first enterprise product, optimising GPU use, is already bringing in millions of dollars in revenue. And its first consumer product, a playable “open world” AI model called Oasis, was released when Decart came out of stealth and already claims “millions” of players.
Now, on the back of that strong exit out of the gates, Decart has raised another $32 million led by Benchmark.
The funding, a Series A, is coming less than two months after the company — which is headquartered in San Francisco but with substantial operations in Israel — had raised a seed round of $21 million from Sequoia and Zeev Ventures, with the two firms also participating in this latest Series A.
And TechCrunch understands from sources that Decart’s new post-money valuation is now over $500 million. (For a point of comparison, the seed valued it at just over $100 million.)
Leitersdorf is a youthful 26, full of energy and coming in fast. He says the aim is not just to take on companies we already know of as big players in the AI field like OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and the rest. He said he wants to build “a kilocorn” — that is, a trillion-dollar company.
“We have a long way to go, and we have great stuff to build,” he added. That being said, he noted that yes, the company has already been approached as an acquisition target multiple times. And there are some interesting (if slightly more modest) comparables if you just look at the optimization piece that Decart has built, such as R …