Dean Leitersdorf

Leitersdorf was born in Israel, later lived in Switzerland and then Palo Alto, and finished high school in two years; he completed a BSc, MSc and PhD in computer science at the Technion in about five years while serving in the Israel Defense Forces.⁠[1]

The Technion Excellence Program alumni page says he graduated summa cum laude in computer science with “the 5th highest GPA in Technion CS history” and earned his PhD at 23, then the youngest in the university’s history; his doctoral work included accelerating matrix multiplication and graph processing, and he did postdoctoral research at the National University of Singapore.⁠[2][3]

He worked on classified projects in Unit 8200 and received the Israel Defense Prize.⁠[2][4]

Leitersdorf began undergraduate studies at 17 while waiting to be drafted into Unit 8200, where he met Moshe Shalev. He said that he “skipped a grade and completed 11th and 12th grades in the same year,” worked in the unit from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and studied in the evenings, admitting: “I didn’t attend most of the lectures.”⁠[5][6]

He earned all three of his degrees at the Technion’s Computer Science faculty in under six years.⁠[7]

Leitersdorf said: “A month after I started my postdoc in Singapore, ChatGPT came out, and it changed everything.”⁠[5]

Leitersdorf, who had served alongside Moshe Shalev in Unit 8200 for several years, co-founded Decart with him in 2023 and became chief executive.⁠[3][8]

The Technion’s computer science faculty announced that Leitersdorf’s dissertation, “Fast Distributed Algorithms via Sparsity Awareness,” supervised by Prof. Keren Censor-Hillel, had won the 2023 Principles of Distributed Computing doctoral dissertation award; the DISC/PODC award page lists him as the 2023 recipient.⁠[9][10]

As chief executive he announced Decart’s $21 million seed round and exit from stealth; Sequoia noted that he splits his time with the Bay Area.⁠[8][3]

At the time of the Series A, Leitersdorf, then 26, wanted to build Decart into a “kilocorn,” a company worth a trillion dollars, describing it as a fully vertically integrated AI research lab.⁠[1]

Discussing Decart’s second round, Leitersdorf said: “We’re building an AI empire” and “We don’t want Israel to fall behind in this race.” He said Oasis reached a million users in three days, faster than ChatGPT’s five, that the company had 35 employees and was on track to end 2024 profitable, and that Benchmark led the round before Oasis launched.⁠[11]

Leitersdorf said: “We’re building an app for a billion users. That’s it—that’s the only goal.” Of his partnership with Shalev: “We complement each other perfectly.” Recalling his move to Palo Alto as a child: “I realized I’d been lied to all my life when people told me I was smart.”⁠[6]

With Moshe Shalev he published the CTech op-ed "From cybernation to AI-nation," arguing Israel "can become the Startup Nation of the AI era" and calling the Innovation Authority's roughly NIS 500 million program through 2027 "negligible in AI terms"; it said Decart "cut AI training and inference costs by more than tenfold" and ended: "We must win."⁠[12]

Leitersdorf said: “When we founded Decart, we decided we wanted to solve a truly massive problem,” adding that it took a year to accept the company would need about five years rather than two. Asked whether the goal was realistic: “Do we have any choice but to try?” and “Don’t fear failure—fear not trying.” He added: “There are many sleepless nights.”⁠[5]

The Technion announced that Leitersdorf had been named to Forbes Israel’s 30 Under 30. “If you’re not in the top 0.1%, it’s not interesting,” he said.⁠[4]

When Decart signed its partnership memorandum with the Technion, Leitersdorf said, “Israel cannot rely solely on technologies developed elsewhere.”⁠[13]

As Decart raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation, he said, “We’re here to build a billion-user consumer app.”⁠[14]

Leitersdorf said Decart has two revenue streams: GPU acceleration generating “tens of millions of dollars” and the new Mirage live-video model. “Live video allows us to talk to computers visually in a way we’ve never experienced before,” he said, offering help if Israel builds a supercomputer: “We know how to optimize GPUs.”⁠[15]

A separate CTech article the same day quoted him: "We're building a before-and-after company."⁠[16]

On Every's AI & I podcast he told Dan Shipper that "Mirage is the only real-time video-to-video model in the world right now" and "We're still 70 people and we're still completely flat." He framed the competition as "the race to AGI" and "the race for consumer dominance," and said "I can write assembly for GPU code ... no idea how the UI works," noting he used Claude Code to contribute to a Flutter app's UI.⁠[17]

On a panel at Calcalist's AI Conference, Leitersdorf said "ChatGPT cannot be the last product that touches a billion users" and "The information layer of the internet is finished," concluding that "What's at stake ... is not just building a company but building a power."⁠[18]

Leitersdorf demonstrated Decart’s model generating live video on Trainium chips at AWS re:Invent, saying the 26 days from Amazon’s invitation to going on stage were the busiest of his life.⁠[19]

ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry contributor Charlie Fink, writing about the Lucy 2 launch, quoted Leitersdorf: “This is the GPT 3 moment for world models.”⁠[20]

Leitersdorf spoke with Bloomberg News at the Raise AI conference in Paris in July 2026, saying Decart trains on text and millions of hours of video to learn real-world physics and that its technology is used for live streaming on Twitch, TikTok and YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry and by advertisers. “I really can’t imagine being in any other market,” he said. “We get to reinvent every different aspect of the economy in the next 18 to 24 months.”⁠[21]

Reporting on Decart’s sale talks, CTech quoted the two founders: “We want to be Google, Apple or Facebook in the field of AI.”⁠[22]

Decart: Official website: https://decart.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]