Anthropic is in advanced talks to acquire Israeli AI startup Decart for approximately $6 billion, according to people familiar with the negotiations, in what would be the Claude maker’s largest acquisition to date as it prepares for a highly anticipated stock market listing.
The deal, first reported by Bloomberg on August 13, has not been finalized and discussions could still collapse, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the talks are private. If completed, it would mark a dramatic valuation jump for Decart, which was valued at roughly $4 billion when it raised $300 million in May in a round led by Radical Ventures with Nvidia as an investor.
What Decart Brings to Anthropic
Decart was founded in 2023 by brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, who met in the Israeli military’s elite Unit 8200 signals intelligence unit. The startup employs roughly 100 people and focuses on two areas that directly address Anthropic’s biggest operational challenges: AI systems that understand video and the physical world, and technology that makes AI models run faster and more efficiently on existing hardware.
The video and physical-world capabilities could expand Claude beyond text into multimodal reasoning, an increasingly important frontier as AI companies compete to build models that can interpret real-world environments. The chip optimization technology is equally strategic, as Anthropic and its rivals face a severe global shortage of AI compute capacity and skyrocketing data center costs.
Decart’s valuation trajectory illustrates the frenzy surrounding AI infrastructure companies. The startup’s earlier funding rounds valued it at $500 million, then $3.1 billion, before the current May round at $4 billion, making the potential $6 billion exit one of the fastest escalations in Israeli technology history.
A Competitive Bidding Process
Anthropic was not the only company interested in Decart. Nvidia held advanced talks to acquire the startup before higher offers emerged, according to Israeli publication Calcalist, with Amazon, Nebius, and SpaceX also named as potential bidders. Elon Musk subsequently said SpaceX would not pursue the acquisition.
The competitive interest underscores how strategically valuable Decart’s technology is perceived to be across the AI industry. For Anthropic, acquiring Decart would establish a significant development presence in Israel, a country whose AI and cybersecurity ecosystem has attracted billions in investment from major US technology companies in recent years.
Context: Anthropic’s Rapid Growth
The potential acquisition comes at a pivotal moment for Anthropic. The company reported more than $11.5 billion in second-quarter revenue, a 14-fold jump from a year ago, and posted its first-ever operating profit of approximately $559 million. Those results have fueled plans for an IPO that could value the company well above $100 billion.
If finalized, the Decart deal would represent a bet that the next competitive advantage in AI lies not just in building larger language models but in controlling the hardware efficiency and multimodal capabilities that determine how cheaply and broadly those models can be deployed.
Sources: Bloomberg; Fortune; Proactive Investors; Calcalist Tech
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