Amazon's $7 Billion Courtship of Israel's Decart
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter, that Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart, an AI startup, in a deal valued at around $7 billion. The Jerusalem Post described the negotiations as advanced, while Reuters, which reprinted the wire copy, said it could not independently verify the report. The Journal itself flagged two outs: the talks could still collapse, or another suitor could emerge. At $7 billion, the price would represent roughly a 75 percent premium to the nearly $4 billion valuation Decart fetched in May, according to PitchBook data cited by the Journal.
Official reaction amounts to silence. Amazon declined to comment outside regular business hours, saying it does not comment on speculation, and Decart did not respond to requests for comment. With no on-the-record confirmation from either party, the entire story rests on anonymous sources described by a single outlet.
Decart's price tag has climbed fast. In May it raised $300 million in a round led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia joining as a new investor, at a valuation of nearly $4 billion. Other backers included Gavin Baker's Atreides Management, the venture arms of Toyota, Adobe and eBay, and Valor Equity Partners. The startup has taken in more than $450 million since its 2023 founding. A $7 billion exit would hand those May investors a paper gain of about 75 percent in a matter of months.
Amazon is at least the third bidder. Israeli publication CTech reported on August 10 that Nvidia was in advanced talks to buy Decart for $6–7 billion, with SpaceX, Amazon and Nebius also interested; a day later Elon Musk denied SpaceX was involved, calling the reports "fake news." Bloomberg reported on August 13 that Anthropic was in talks at roughly $6 billion, then reported on September 8 that Anthropic walked away after due diligence. Amazon's $7 billion pitch effectively reprices the company after two potential buyers dropped out.
Decart was founded in 2023 by Israeli engineers Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, later joined by Dean's brother Orian, with a San Francisco research center led by Kfir Aberman, a DreamBooth paper co-author from Snap and Google Research. The team is around 50 people. Its assets split two ways: real-time video and world models — Lucy edits live video, while Oasis generates simulated environments for training robotics and autonomous-driving systems, and the November 2024 Oasis launch passed a million users within three days — plus optimization software that lets developers run models across different processors. Futurum Equities strategist Shay Boloor said Amazon is "effectively buying software expertise" to improve utilization of its in-house Trainium chips.
The potential deal sits inside Amazon's broader AI spending. Amazon has already put $8 billion into Anthropic, then announced in April a further $5 billion now and up to $20 billion more later, against Anthropic's commitment of more than $100 billion over ten years to AWS technologies and up to 5 gigawatts of Trainium capacity. Amazon raised its 2026 capital expenditure plan to roughly $220 billion (actual 2025 spending was about $128 billion). For Nvidia, a portfolio company would land with one of its biggest customers; for Anthropic, it is a second missed swing; for Nebius and other once-interested parties, the window is closing.
The next milestones are due diligence and regulatory review, and the Journal explicitly left room for the deal to fall apart. No agreement has been signed. If it closes, the acquisition would rank among Amazon's largest in recent years and mark the latest case of an Israeli AI startup being absorbed by a US hyperscaler. If it dies, Decart's sale saga will simply move to its next chapter.