Decart raises $300m | Electronics Weekly

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Three year-old startup Decart of San Francisco has raised $300 million to develop software which allows AI programmes to run on any hardware.

Backers include Radical Ventures, Amazon, Google, Nvidia, Atreides Management, Michael Eisner, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and the Yamauchi family, which founded Nintendo. In August Decart raised $153 million from Sequoia, Benchmark and other investors.

The inclusion of Nvidia has caused comment because Decart’s main product makes it easier for people not to use Nvidia’s chips.

The main product is the Decart Optimization Stack, or DOS which makes it easier for AI developers to sync their models with different types of processors.

“Moving models between different hardwares is incredibly hard, and we’ve seen companies signing contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to help them shift models from one hardware to another,” says Decart co-founder Dean Leitersdorf, “we’re kind of the great equaliser.” 

The startup’s other business involves building AI tools that use real-time video generation to create interactive, 3-D replicas of everything from  Minecraft to climate patterns. 

Its two models, Oasis and Lucy, have business applications in e-commerce, gaming, and robotics, among other fields. 

Amazon, is Decart’s  biggest customer so far. Leitersdorf said that he’s selling to hyperscalers and AI labs.