{"id":143111,"date":"2026-08-18T02:30:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T02:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/143111\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T02:30:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T02:30:09","slug":"israeli-ai-startup-decart-nears-multibillion-dollar-anthropic-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/143111\/","title":{"rendered":"Israeli AI startup Decart nears multibillion-dollar Anthropic deal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, the founders of Israeli AI startup Decart are in the final stages of signing a huge deal with Anthropic, the US AI company behind Claude<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The deal is expected to not only bring one of the world’s most successful language model developers to Israel but also create at least two new billionaires on a scale not much different from that created by the huge exit of Wiz.<\/p>\n

According to industry estimates, Leitersdorf and his team managed to retain control of Decart and a combined shareholding of about 64% of the company’s shares, a control that gives them a combined value on paper of about $4 billion.<\/p>\n

After Leitersdorf’s brother, Orian, joined the company’s founding team as its chief scientist last year, each of the three founders is expected to receive an estimated $1 billion to $1.5 billion, slightly less than what Wiz founders Assaf Rapaport,<\/a> Yinon Kostika, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik pocketed, who are believed to have received just under $2 billion each.<\/p>\n

However, while Wiz’s founders received full compensation for their stake in the company in cash from Google last March, Decart’s founders preferred to take a lower offer in terms of overall size, but one that included shares of a company that is on its way to being listed on the NYSE.<\/p>\n

\"\u201cMicrosoft\u2019s\u201cMicrosoft\u2019s move reflects a broader shift from AI hype to cost-conscious adoption.\u201d (credit: SHUTTERSTOCK)The big winners in the deal include founders, tax agency<\/p>\n

Leitersdorf and his team received an acquisition offer from Nvidia<\/a>, which was higher than Anthropic’s and was estimated to be $7-8 billion. Anthropic, however, agreed to give an upper limit of $6 billion, but mostly in shares, and according to estimates, the company spent only a few hundred million dollars from its coffers in cash and the rest will be given to Decart shareholders in Anthropic shares.<\/p>\n

Decart’s shareholders believe they can produce a higher return from shares of a company like Anthropic, which is planning to launch the largest IPO in history, at a company valuation of $2 trillion, with annual revenues expected to reach $100-120 billion by the end of the year, according to Fortune.<\/p>\n

As with the Wiz deal, the vast majority of investors in the company are not Israelis, with the exception of the Aleph fund of Michael Eisenberg, an advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which holds a very small stake in the company. The majority of the investor shares are owned by major US funds such as Benchmark, Sequoia, Radical Ventures and Zeev Ventures, a US fund managed by serial investor Oren Zeev. The main investors are expected to share more than $2 billion.<\/p>\n

The bulk of the state’s revenues from the deal will come, according to industry estimates, from the shares of the three founders. Assuming that the Israeli founders exercise their shares at their current value, about NIS 12 billion, this represents a potential income of around NIS 4.2 billion, including a maximum capital gains tax of 30% and a maximum surtax of 5%.<\/p>\n

“Receiving shares in lieu of cash is subject to tax, even though the founders receive an illiquid asset,” says Adv. (CPA) Racheli Guz-Lavi, Managing Partner and Head of the Tax Department at Amit Pollak Matalon (APM) law firm.<\/p>\n

“However, if certain conditions are met, the tax event can be postponed until the shares are exercised in the future, in accordance with the provisions of the structural changes in the Income Tax Ordinance and subject to the fulfillment of the legal conditions and approvals required of the shareholders. If part of the proceeds are exercised as part of a secondary transaction, in which shares are sold for cash, then tax will be paid on this portion at the time of sale.”<\/p>\n

As Guz-Lavie explains, taxation of exit funds given in the buyer’s shares is a more complex event:<\/p>\n

“If Anthropic is issued in the future and the value of its shares increases, the state may ultimately collect tax on a larger profit. On the other hand, if the value of the shares decreases, the future tax may also be lower. Therefore, in such a deal, the question is not only how many billions the founders are worth ‘on paper’, but when the shares will become liquid, at what value they will be realized, and how much tax the state will see today and how much only in the future.”<\/p>\n

Expanding operations<\/p>\n

If Anthropic completes the acquisition, it will be the AI giant’s first activity in Israel, having previously operated here only through Israeli salespeople stationed in Ireland<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, Decart is expected to continue to be a R&D center for Anthropic products, with an emphasis on improving the efficiency of running Anthropic’s models on various types of chips such as Nvidia’s graphics processors, Google’s TPU processors and Amazon’s “Infernasia” processors.<\/p>\n

Decart could become Anthropic’s second R&D center outside the US, with 89 employees in Israel and another 17 in the US. Anthropic is currently expanding its development activities in London, where it is building a 15,000 square meter center that employs 200 people.<\/p>\n

Competitor OpenAI is also expanding its activities, as part of the race for a Wall Street IPO alongside Anthropic. As “Globes” reported last month, the company has hired a team of senior salespeople from Amazon’s<\/a> AWS cloud operations in the US and Europe, with the aim of recruiting many new corporate customers.<\/p>\n

However, sources close to the company have made it clear that it has no intention of opening operations in Israel or hiring a representative here to manage local operations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, the founders of Israeli AI startup Decart are in the final stages of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138567,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[53,25,309,138,157,591,11366],"class_list":["post-143111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-business","tag-ipo","tag-openai","tag-stock-market","tag-technology-innovation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}