Dean Leitersdorf

Dean Leitersdorf is an Israeli artificial intelligence entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief executive officer of Decart, the Tel Aviv and San Francisco real-time generative-video and world-model company behind the Oasis and MirageLSD products.
Nextomoro
8 min read
Dean Leitersdorf

Dean Leitersdorf

Dean Leitersdorf is an Israeli artificial intelligence and distributed-systems researcher and technology executive. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Decart, the 2023 Tel Aviv and San Francisco artificial intelligence company building real-time generative-video and interactive world-model technology, with Moshe Shalev as co-founder and chief product officer. He was previously a doctoral and postdoctoral researcher in distributed computing at the Technion in Haifa, where he completed bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in computer science by age 23 alongside Israeli military service.

At a glance

  • Education: Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), BSc, MSc, and PhD in computer science completed in approximately five years across 11 semesters; PhD awarded 2022 at age 23 under the supervision of Keren Censor-Hillel on the dissertation "Fast Distributed Algorithms via Sparsity Awareness"; subsequent postdoctoral position at the National University of Singapore. Earlier secondary education at Palo Alto High School, completed in two years.
  • Current role: Co-founder and chief executive officer of Decart since 2023.
  • Key contributions: 2023 ACM PODC Doctoral Dissertation Award (co-recipient with Siddhartha Jayanti) for "Fast Distributed Algorithms via Sparsity Awareness"; multi-author distributed-computing papers at PODC, SPAA, ITCS, and Distributed Computing across 2022 to 2026; co-founder and chief executive of Decart from 2023, leading the Oasis real-time generative-video model launched October 2024, the MirageLSD Live-Stream Diffusion model launched July 2025, and the Oasis 2.0 successor model launched September 2025.
  • X / Twitter: @DLeitersdorf
  • LinkedIn: dean-leitersdorf
  • Google Scholar: Dean Leitersdorf
  • dblp: Dean Leitersdorf

Origins

Leitersdorf was born in Israel and spent portions of his childhood in Switzerland and Palo Alto, California, as his parents advanced their academic careers in medicine and research. His father, Eran Leitersdorf, is a former dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his elder brother Yoav Leitersdorf is the founder and managing partner of the Israeli cybersecurity-focused venture firm YL Ventures. He has cited the family's research orientation and culture of academic acceleration as a formative influence.

He completed his secondary education at Palo Alto High School in two years, then returned to Israel to enter the Technion Faculty of Computer Science as an undergraduate at 17. The early-career period overlapped with service in Unit 8200, the Israeli Defense Forces signals-intelligence unit, where he met his future Decart co-founder Moshe Shalev.

Career

Leitersdorf's academic career at the Technion ran from 2017 undergraduate enrollment through the May 2022 PhD defense and a subsequent postdoctoral position. The doctoral period under Censor-Hillel produced a research line on fast distributed algorithms in sparse and congested-clique models, with co-authors including Yi-Jun Chang, Michal Dory, François Le Gall, and David Vulakh across PODC, SPAA, ITCS, and Distributed Computing venues. The 2022 dissertation "Fast Distributed Algorithms via Sparsity Awareness" was co-recipient of the 2023 ACM PODC Doctoral Dissertation Award, shared with Siddhartha Jayanti of MIT. A postdoctoral position at the National University of Singapore followed the PhD. The military service in Unit 8200 overlapped the Technion coursework, an arrangement enabled by the Israeli elite-track frameworks; his co-founder Moshe Shalev spent approximately 14 years in the unit before the Decart founding.

In September 2023 Leitersdorf co-founded Decart with Moshe Shalev. Both founders were called to reserve duty within a month of registering the company and remained mobilized for several months following the October 2023 conflict. The founding thesis was that real-time generative-video and interactive world-model applications would require an end-to-end vertically integrated stack from low-level GPU optimization through model training to consumer-facing applications, and that the cost-per-hour of generated video could be reduced by roughly two orders of magnitude through custom kernel work and inference-stack rewrites. Decart is headquartered in Tel Aviv with operations in San Francisco.

The Decart fundraising trajectory has been compressed. The August 2024 seed round of $21 million was led by Sequoia Capital at an approximately $100 million valuation, with Zeev Ventures participating. The December 2024 Series A of $32 million led by Benchmark closed less than two months later at a $500 million valuation. The August 2025 Series B of $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation added Aleph VC as a new investor. Cumulative private capital is approximately $153 million across three rounds in 11 months. The October 2024 launch of Oasis, the real-time interactive Minecraft-equivalent world model, reached one million users within three days; the July 2025 launch of MirageLSD introduced the first sub-40-millisecond Live-Stream Diffusion model; and the September 2025 launch of Oasis 2.0 raised the resolution to 1080p and the frame rate to 30 frames per second.

Affiliations

Notable contributions

Leitersdorf's public output spans the founding of Decart, the doctoral and postdoctoral distributed-algorithms research line, and a public-talk record concentrated on real-time generative-video and the vertically integrated AI-research-lab thesis.

Investments and boards

Entries below are limited to AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, and energy.

  • Decart (AI): Co-founder and chief executive officer, September 2023 to present. Cumulative private capital approximately $153 million across three publicly disclosed rounds through August 2025, with a $3.1 billion valuation at the most recent round.

No other public investor activity on record in AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, or energy as of May 2026.

Network

Leitersdorf's longest-running professional partnership is with Moshe Shalev, his Decart co-founder and chief product officer, with whom he served in Unit 8200 for several years before the September 2023 Decart founding. Shalev's approximately 14-year 8200 tenure across special-operations roles complemented Leitersdorf's distributed-systems research background. The Decart team has expanded to approximately 50 employees through the 2024-to-2026 period.

His academic network is anchored by Keren Censor-Hillel, his Technion PhD advisor, with frequent co-authors including Yi-Jun Chang at the National University of Singapore, Michal Dory at the University of Haifa, and François Le Gall at Nagoya University. His brother Orian Leitersdorf, also a Technion computer-science PhD recipient, is a co-author on the AritPIM paper.

The Decart investor base provides the broader commercial anchor. Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Zeev Ventures, and Aleph VC are the institutional investors, with the Series A led by Victor Lazarte at Benchmark and Sonya Huang and Shaun Maguire of Sequoia on the founder-relationship side. Among real-time-generative-video and world-model peer founders, his position runs in parallel with Vik Bajaj and others at World Labs, with overlap on the consumer-AI direction with Sam Altman at OpenAI, Runway, Pika, Luma AI, and Sakana AI.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Leitersdorf occupies a structurally distinctive position among insurgent-lab chief executives through the Israeli academic-prodigy research origin, the Unit 8200 operating credential, the distributed-computing dissertation award, and the vertically integrated world-model architectural bet at Decart. The career arc through Palo Alto High School, the Technion, Unit 8200, and the Singapore postdoc maps onto a research-first founder profile uncommon in the broader real-time-generative-video cohort.

Industry coverage has consistently characterized Decart under Leitersdorf's leadership as one of the principal commercial real-time interactive world-model labs globally, alongside World Labs on the spatial-intelligence side, Runway, Pika, and Luma AI on the generative-video product side, Sakana AI on the world-models research side, and the in-house Sora and Genie products at OpenAI and Google DeepMind. The competitive frame is unusual: Decart's vertically integrated stack from custom CUDA kernels through model training to consumer-facing real-time products differs from the foundation-model-API orthodoxy that dominates much of the broader generative-video cohort.

The Decart valuation at the August 2025 Series B, approximately $3.1 billion, places the company among the higher-valued Israeli AI insurgents. The funding scale, paired with reported low capital burn through the Series B, has been characterized in primary press as supporting an extended runway for the consumer-application strategy.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

  • Successor world-model release. Capability profile of next-generation Oasis and MirageLSD successor models, and published benchmark positions on real-time-video evaluations.
  • Decart consumer product launch. Whether Decart launches a broadly available consumer-facing real-time-world-model application meeting the stated billion-user ambition.
  • Cloud and platform partnership scaling. Whether the Crusoe Cloud, Comcast, and NVIDIA partnerships produce broader integration with consumer-facing distribution channels.
  • Series-C successor financing. Whether Decart raises a follow-on round, the lead investor profile, and the cumulative capital level relative to insurgent-cohort peers.
  • Academic research continuity. Whether Leitersdorf continues to publish in the distributed-computing literature alongside the Decart commercial intensity, and whether the Technion partnership announced in 2025 produces joint research output.
  • Public-talk and research-paper cadence. Whether Decart publishes additional technical papers on the Live-Stream Diffusion architecture and the cost-per-generated-hour optimization line.

Sources

Person Decart
About the author
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