Sequoia-Backed Decart Achieves Early Profitability, Leveraging Its Efficient AI Infrastructure Platform to Release the First-Ever Real-Time Generative AI Virtual Models
SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / October 31, 2024 / Decart, an efficiency-focused AI research lab, emerged from stealth today and announced that it has raised $21 million in funding. The seed round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Zeev Ventures, who were the company's first investors in September 2023. Founded by Dean Leitersdorf (CEO) and Moshe Shalev (CPO), Decart has built an AI infrastructure platform that enhances the efficiency of AI models tenfold, offering faster and more reliable training as well as real-time inference. Leveraging these capabilities, Decart is now training AI foundation models to create new generative AI experiences and today introduces its first model powering an interactive, real-time AI-only video game. This real-time, generative open-world model is the first of its kind, and Decart is able to run it at costs that are substantially lower than industry expectations.
From left to right: Dean Leitersdorf, CEO; Moshe Shalev, CPO. Credit: Amit Elkayam
As AI is shaping industries worldwide at an accelerating pace, virtual user experiences are poised for transformation. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, stated how every single pixel will soon be generated, marking the shift toward generative experiences and the exciting opportunities for creating new, interactive GenAI experiences. However, the escalating costs of training advanced AI models and running them in production, especially those needed for such ambitious applications, have largely confined access to tech giants and large corporations. Stanford University estimated that training Google's Gemini Ultra alone cost $191.4 million, while OpenAI projects AI model training expenses could reach $9.5 billion annually by 2026. These soaring costs emphasize the pressing need for robust technological infrastructure that will allow AI to reinvent our virtual experiences.
Decart's platform enables organizations to train massive AI models at scale while significantly reducing training costs and improving efficiency tenfold. It ensures reliability during cluster training, providing stability in the face of hardware errors, and supports faster training and inference, resulting in quicker iteration times for AI research, substantial cost savings, and faster delivery. Within just a few months of launching, Decart achieved early profitability, securing paying enterprise customers and generating millions in revenue. Now, Decart is making a big bet on generative AI experiences, building its own foundation models and equipping the AI community with tools to eventually create their own real-time, AI-driven interactive experiences faster than ever before.
"Decart's journey has been unconventional from the outset-and we are executing a game-changing platform that maximizes AI training efficiency for organizations," said Dean Leitersdorf, Co-Founder and CEO of Decart. "With this new funding, we take our vision to the next level - doubling down on our business momentum and technical expertise to usher in a new era of generative experiences and unlock possibilities that were once only imagined."
Amid its launch, Decart unveils its first generative experience model - an interactive AI video game that operates 10 times more efficiently than traditional AI models. This model represents one of the first fully playable world models in GenAI history, introducing a new form of human-AI interaction and enabling players to create a playable gaming experience with minimal latency. Typically, such models require tens of millions of dollars for training and even more for deployment at scale, but Decart's technological capabilities across the entire AI stack have made this achievement possible as an early-stage startup. As the company pushes the boundaries of generative experiences, this marks just one of many innovations and use cases in its broader vision, where entire interactive worlds can eventually be simulated solely from human prompts.
"With AI constantly maturing, it's time to kickstart the consumer AI revolution - equipping everyday users with advanced capabilities to create imaginary worlds and experiences of their own," said Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia Capital. "Decart's founding team stood out not only for their extraordinary technical expertise but also for their ability to build systems with multiple orders of magnitude cost advantage over competitors. This reminded us of Google in the early days where they pushed commodity hardware to its limits with clever distributed systems algorithms and low-level optimizations. Sequoia is thrilled to back Decart as they take on this crucial mission."
About Decart
Decart is a cutting-edge, efficiency-focused AI research lab bringing generative experiences to all. Founded in 2023 and backed by Sequoia Capital and Zeev Ventures, Decart leverages its efficient AI training and inference capabilities alongside cluster training reliability to push the boundaries of generative experiences. Learn more on decart.ai.
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SOURCE: Decart
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