Amazon in Talks to Acquire AI Startup Decart for Up to $7 Billion

Quick Facts

• Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart, an Israeli AI startup, in a deal that could reach $7 billion.
• Decart raised $300 million in May 2026 at a $4 billion valuation, backed by Nvidia, Adobe Ventures, and Radical Ventures.
• Decart's core product, the Decart Optimization Stack, enables AI inference at over 1,600 tokens per second, roughly eight times the industry average.

Amazon is in advanced discussions to acquire Decart.ai Inc., an Israeli artificial intelligence company, in a deal that could be worth up to $7 billion. The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the talks, reported that a deal could close within days if negotiations hold and no competing offer emerges.

Both Amazon and Decart have declined to comment publicly. Israeli news outlet Calcalist had also reported that Decart was in advanced talks with a major technology company before Amazon was identified as the buyer.

Who Is Decart

Decart was founded in September 2023 by Dr. Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, both veterans of Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200. Leitersdorf earned his PhD from the Technion at 23, becoming the youngest person to do so, and his dissertation won the ACM PODC Dissertation Award.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York and Tel Aviv. It employs more than 60 people and has raised over $450 million in total funding.

What Amazon Is Buying

Decart's flagship product is the Decart Optimization Stack, or DOS, a software layer that accelerates AI model performance across hardware from multiple vendors, including Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs, and Amazon's own Trainium chips. DOS 2.0, released in May 2026, enables AI agents to process more than 1,600 tokens per second, compared to an industry average of roughly 200.

Nafea Bshara, VP of Amazon's Annapurna Labs, said Decart was among the first companies to optimize on Trainium3. He noted that Decart's Lucy2 model exceeds 80% Model FLOPS Utilization on the chip.

Decart has two additional products. Lucy is a real-time video editing model that can show live footage of people wearing clothing or accessories, targeting fashion e-commerce. eBay is both an investor and a customer. Oasis is a simulation model used to train robotics and autonomous-driving systems. Oasis reached one million users within three days of launch, a faster adoption rate than ChatGPT at its debut.

A Fast Rise and Multiple Suitors

Decart's valuation has climbed rapidly. Its first funding round of $21 million was led by Sequoia Capital. A second round of $25 million followed one month later at a roughly $500 million valuation. By August 2025, the company was valued at $3.1 billion. The May 2026 Series C round, led by Radical Ventures with participation from Nvidia, Adobe Ventures, Toyota Ventures, and angel investor Andrej Karpathy, valued Decart at nearly $4 billion.

Amazon is not the first company to pursue Decart. Nvidia held advanced acquisition talks with the startup before those discussions fell apart. Anthropic also made an offer, reportedly around $6 billion, before Amazon emerged with a higher bid. The $7 billion figure represents a premium of more than 75% over Decart's May 2026 valuation.

What It Means for Amazon

An acquisition would give Amazon a software layer that improves AI performance on its own Trainium chips, a strategic advantage as the company competes with Nvidia and Google in the AI infrastructure market. DOS reducing model optimization time from months to weeks is a direct cost-reduction tool for enterprise AI deployments running on AWS.

Decart CEO Leitersdorf has framed the company's ambition in broad terms. "We're not building a startup," he said. "We're building a before-and-after company. Like the iPhone. Like Google Search." Whether that vision continues under Amazon ownership remains to be seen.

Read more: Report: Amazon in talks with AI startup Decart over possible $7B acquisition