Moshe Shalev

Moshe Shalev is an Israeli technology executive and product operator. He is the co-founder and chief product officer of Decart, the 2023 Tel Aviv and San Francisco artificial intelligence company building real-time generative-video and interactive world-model technology, with Dean Leitersdorf as co-founder and chief executive officer. He spent approximately 13 years in Unit 8200, the Israeli Defense Forces signals-intelligence unit, where he built and ran large-scale AI infrastructure and served as right-hand to then-unit commander Yossi Sariel before the Decart founding.

At a glance

• Education: Bachelor's degree in management information systems, completed during military service. Earlier accounting studies through a program for the ultra-Orthodox community while working in retail in Jerusalem.
• Current role: Co-founder and chief product officer of Decart since 2023.
• Key contributions: Co-founder and chief product officer of Decart with Dean Leitersdorf since September 2023, leading product strategy, infrastructure scaling, and operations across 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; approximately 13 years in Unit 8200, where he built and managed large-scale AI infrastructure across project-management, special-operations, and senior-aide roles; co-founder of the StartAch nonprofit in 2017 with fellow Unit 8200 alum Dor Saban, building software for Israeli nonprofits.
• X / Twitter: @MosheSshalev
• LinkedIn: moshe-shalev

Origins

Shalev was born and raised in an ultra-Orthodox Haredi household in Bnei Brak, Israel, the seventh of eight siblings. His upbringing followed the standard Haredi educational track through yeshiva. At age 17 he left the yeshiva and moved to Jerusalem, where he worked a series of retail and service jobs (including a stretch in a butcher shop) while studying accounting through a program designed for ultra-Orthodox students. He married young and had his first child during this period.

Most ultra-Orthodox men in Israel do not enlist in the Israeli Defense Forces, citing yeshiva-study exemptions. The decision to break with that pattern came after a terror attack in Jerusalem in his early twenties. At age 23, married and with a child at home, Shalev enlisted through the "Bina Beyarok" (Intelligence in Green) program, an IDF track designed to integrate Haredi men into military technology units.

Career

Shalev spent approximately 13 years in Unit 8200, the Israeli Defense Forces signals-intelligence unit and the largest organizational source of Israeli technology-startup founders. The 8200 tenure spanned project-management, special-operations, and senior-aide roles. According to a Calcalist profile, Shalev built and ran large-scale AI infrastructure inside the unit and rose to serve as right-hand to then-commander Yossi Sariel, the public Sariel later succeeded by Israeli press coverage when he joined Decart as a non-executive figure in early 2025. The 8200 cohort that overlapped Shalev's service produced a disproportionate share of Israel's commercial AI and cybersecurity founder cohort, including his future Decart co-founder Dean Leitersdorf, with whom he met during reserves service.

In 2017, while still active in 8200, Shalev co-founded the StartAch nonprofit with fellow unit alum Dor Saban. The organization develops software solutions for Israeli nonprofits on a volunteer-built basis and remains active. He completed a bachelor's degree in management information systems during the military period.

In September 2023, Shalev co-founded Decart with Dean Leitersdorf. 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, with cost-per-hour of generated video reduced by roughly two orders of magnitude through custom kernel work and inference-stack rewrites. The Decart partnership pairs Leitersdorf's distributed-systems research credential with Shalev's operating credential, what Calcalist characterized as "a more grounded business mindset" alongside the technological vision. 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. Shalev has been the operational owner of the production-infrastructure scaling that supported the October 2024 Oasis launch, which reached one million users within three days, and the July 2025 MirageLSD launch, the first sub-40-millisecond Live-Stream Diffusion model.

Affiliations

• Israel Defense Forces, Unit 8200: Project manager, special-operations and senior-aide roles, approximately 2010 to 2023. Approximately 13 years across active and reserve service.
• StartAch: Co-founder, 2017 to present. Volunteer-built software-solutions nonprofit for Israeli nonprofits, co-founded with Dor Saban.
• Decart: Co-founder and chief product officer, September 2023 to present.

Notable contributions

Shalev's public output is concentrated on company-building and operating work rather than published research or public-talk volume.

• Decart (2023). Co-founder and chief product officer. Public artifacts include the Oasis launch (October 2024, the real-time interactive Minecraft-equivalent world model that reached one million users within three days), MirageLSD (July 2025, the first Live-Stream Diffusion model with sub-40-millisecond latency for arbitrary live-video transformation), and Oasis 2.0 (September 2025, 1080p resolution at 30 frames per second). Shalev's Calcalist account of the Oasis launch describes the production-infrastructure scaling response to the launch surge as "in 45 minutes, we managed to onboard thousands of users, scaling up more and more cloud processing capacity while developing on the fly. We left the office at 4:30 in the morning."
• StartAch (2017). Co-founder of the volunteer-built nonprofit, with Dor Saban, providing software solutions for Israeli nonprofits.
• Unit 8200 AI infrastructure (approximately 2010 to 2023). Built and managed large-scale AI infrastructure inside the unit, an experience that anchors Decart's production-side credibility per Sequoia's partnership announcement.
• Public-talk record. Limited solo public-speaking record. Shalev has appeared in Israeli press interviews covering the Decart consumer-application thesis and the Calcalist long-form profile on the founding-team dynamic, with no notable solo conference keynote on record as of May 2026.

Investments and boards

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

• Decart (AI): Co-founder and chief product 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

Shalev's longest-running professional partnership is with Dean Leitersdorf, his Decart co-founder and chief executive officer, with whom he served in Unit 8200 reserves before the September 2023 Decart founding. Leitersdorf's distributed-systems research background, anchored by the 2023 ACM PODC dissertation award, complements Shalev's approximately 13-year 8200 operating credential and infrastructure-build record. The Decart team has expanded to approximately 50 employees through the 2024-to-2026 period under their joint leadership.

The 8200 alumni network anchors a second set of relationships. Yossi Sariel, the former 8200 commander to whom Shalev served as right-hand, joined Decart in early 2025 in a non-executive role per Israeli press coverage. The StartAch co-founding partnership with fellow 8200 alum Dor Saban dates from 2017. The Bnei Brak Haredi-community connection has produced public-positioning material for Israeli ultra-Orthodox-tech-integration coverage in The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, and Israeli-language press.

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.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Shalev occupies a structurally distinctive position among insurgent-lab co-founders through the Haredi-community-to-8200 entry path, the approximately 13-year unit tenure across special-operations and senior-aide roles, and the operating-side ownership of Decart's vertically integrated real-time-generative-video stack. The career arc through Bnei Brak yeshiva, Jerusalem retail work, the Bina Beyarok program, Unit 8200, and the Decart co-founding maps onto an unusual founder profile in the broader real-time-generative-video cohort.

Industry coverage has consistently characterized the Leitersdorf-and-Shalev partnership as one of the principal commercial real-time interactive world-model founder teams 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 Calcalist profile of the founding team characterizes Shalev's contribution as the operating-side complement to Leitersdorf's research-and-vision side, with an 11-year age gap that the article frames as a complementary fit rather than a friction point.

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, the operational thread Shalev anchors.
• 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.
• Founding-partnership stability. Whether the Leitersdorf-and-Shalev founding partnership remains intact through the consumer-application launch phase and the next funding cycle.
• Public-talk and press cadence. Frequency and substance of conference appearances and Israeli-press interviews as Decart navigates the consumer-application launch.

Sources

• Moshe Shalev LinkedIn profile. Public profile listing the Decart, StartAch, and Unit 8200 roles.
• Moshe Shalev on X (@MosheSshalev). Public X account.
• Moshe Shalev Crunchbase profile. Crunchbase profile listing the Decart co-founder and chief-product-officer role.
• Moshe Shalev at The Org. The Org listing of Shalev's Decart role and prior 8200 project-management background.
• Inside Decart: The Israeli startup chasing AI greatness. Calcalist long-form profile of the Decart founding team with detailed biographical context on Shalev's Bnei Brak upbringing, the Bina Beyarok enlistment path, and the 8200 tenure.
• "We could have built a great company to sell to Nvidia, but we're building an app for a billion users". Ynetnews 2025 interview with the Decart founders on the consumer-application thesis and the rejection of early acquisition discussions.
• From stealth to $3.1 billion in less than a year. Calcalist coverage of the Decart Series B with founder biographical detail.
• Former Unit 8200 commander Yossi Sariel joins AI unicorn Decart. Calcalist coverage of Sariel's 2025 Decart appointment with context on Shalev's service under his command.
• Partnering with Decart: The Future of AI-Generated Experiences. Sequoia Capital announcement of the seed-round investment with founder biographical context.
• Decart nabs $32M at $500M+ valuation to build AI tech and 'open world' apps. TechCrunch coverage of the December 2024 Series A.
• Decart raises $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation. Fortune coverage of the August 2025 Series B.
• MirageLSD: The First Live-Stream Diffusion AI Video Model. July 2025 product announcement on Decart's site.
• Oasis 2.0 launch. September 2025 successor model with 1080p, 30-frame-per-second performance.
• Decart official site. Real-time world-models lab homepage and product index.
• Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev | Madan. Madan profile on the Decart founding team.
• StartAch nonprofit. The Israeli volunteer-built software nonprofit Shalev co-founded in 2017 with Dor Saban.