# Dean Leitersdorf

> Dean Leitersdorf is the 27-year-old Co-Founder and CEO of Decart, an AI research lab building real-time world models and ultra-fast inference infrastructure. A Technion PhD graduate at 23 and veteran of Israel's elite Unit 8200, he co-founded Decart in late 2023 with Moshe Shalev. The company went from stealth to unicorn status in under a year, raising over $453M total including a $300M Series C in May 2026 backed by NVIDIA, Radical Ventures, Adobe, Toyota, and angel investors including Andrej Karpathy. Decart's products - DOS (inference stack), Lucy (real-time video transformation), and Oasis (the viral AI-generated Minecraft-like game) - position it as a vertically integrated AI company targeting a billion-user consumer app.

- **Role:** Co-Founder and CEO at Decart
- **Organizations:** Decart, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Unit 8200 (IDF), National University of Singapore
- **From:** Israel
- **Nationality:** Israeli
- **Education:** BSc in Computer Science, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, MSc in Computer Science, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, PhD in Computer Science - Fast Distributed Algorithms via Sparsity Awareness, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, High School (completed in 2 years), Palo Alto High School
- **Known for:** PhD at age 23, one of the youngest in Technion's history, ACM PODC 2023 Dissertation Award for distributed computing research, Completed BSc, MSc, and PhD simultaneously in ~5 years while serving in the IDF

## Career timeline

- **~2016** — Completed high school at Palo Alto High School in two years
- **2018-2023** — Completed BSc, MSc, and PhD in Computer Science at Technion in approximately 5 years while serving in the IDF
- **2018-2023** — Served in Israel's elite military intelligence Unit 8200; met co-founder Moshe Shalev
- **2023** — Received ACM PODC Dissertation Award and outstanding doctoral award in distributed computing; one of youngest PhD graduates in Technion history at age 23
- **2023** — Postdoctoral research at National University of Singapore
- **Late 2023** — Co-founded Decart with Moshe Shalev; raised $21M seed from Sequoia Capital and Zeev Ventures
- **2024** — Decart emerged from stealth; raised $32M Series A at $500M+ valuation
- **October 2024** — Launched Oasis - the viral real-time AI-generated open world game (Minecraft-inspired), went viral globally
- **2024** — Achieved profitability within three months of public launch
- **2025** — Raised $100M Series B at $3.1B valuation; launched DOS 2.0, Lucy 2.0/2.1, and DecartXR
- **May 2026** — Raised $300M Series C at ~$4B valuation led by Radical Ventures with NVIDIA, Adobe, Toyota, and others

## Achievements

- PhD at age 23, one of the youngest in Technion's history
- ACM PODC 2023 Dissertation Award for distributed computing research
- Completed BSc, MSc, and PhD simultaneously in ~5 years while serving in the IDF
- Co-founded Decart which reached unicorn status in under one year from stealth
- Built Oasis - the first real-time AI-generated interactive video game, which went viral globally
- Raised over $453M in total funding from investors including NVIDIA, Sequoia, Adobe, and Toyota
- DOS 2.0 inference stack processes 1,600+ tokens/second (8x industry average) and 100 HD video frames/second
- Decart achieved profitability within three months of public launch
- Lucy - the only real-time world model running in production at scale today
- Topped Calcalist's 50 most promising startups list for 2025

## Latest updates

- **2026-05** — Decart raised $300M Series C at ~$4B valuation led by Radical Ventures, with NVIDIA, Adobe, Toyota, eBay Ventures, and angel investors including Andrej Karpathy and Michael Eisner
- **2026-04** — Dean spoke at HumanX conference in San Francisco (April 6-9, 2026)
- **2025-10** — Launched DecartXR open-source app for real-time world transformation via voice commands
- **2025-08** — Decart raised $100M Series B at $3.1B valuation; Forbes and Fortune featured the company
- **2024-10** — Launched Oasis - the first real-time AI-generated open world game inspired by Minecraft - which went viral globally

## Links

- Website: https://decart.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dean-leitersdorf
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/dleitersdorf

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/dean-leitersdorf
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-27