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By participating in Decart's $300M funding round, Nvidia is not just investing in a player of world models. The group is positioning itself in a software optimization layer that claims compatibility with its own GPUs, as well as with Amazon Trainium and Google's TPUs - in other words, with part of the competing infrastructure.
The $300 million funding round for Decart, completed in May 2026 with an unconfirmed valuation of $4 billion by the parties, is led by Radical Ventures and includes Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Toyota Ventures, whose investment director Chris Abshire publicly confirmed the participation. Amazon is listed as the first signing customer, Nvidia as an investor and business partner of the startup's AI infrastructure. The Israeli startup, founded in late 2023 by 27-year-old CEO Dean Leitersdorf and Chief Product Officer Moshe Shalev, both former members of Unit 8200, an elite Israeli military intelligence division, is now based in San Francisco. The report, picked up by Tech in Asia on May 19, originates from the Israeli economic daily Calcalist.
A Fast-Paced Nvidia Investment Machine
This operation is part of a shift in Nvidia's investment scale since 2022. According to PitchBook data cited by AI Business Weekly, the GPU manufacturer participated in nearly 67 venture capital rounds throughout 2025, compared to 54 in 2024, excluding investments from NVentures, its internal venture capital structure. The latter, which had only closed one deal in 2022, completed 30 in 2025 alone. In terms of value, the exposure is also documented: according to regulatory filings cited by CNBC, Nvidia's unlisted equity portfolio reached $3.8 billion in July 2025, compared to $1.8 billion in July 2024 - doubling in twelve months. This perimeter includes Mistral AI, Cohere, Runway, and Safe Superintelligence. ActuIA documented as early as July 2024 the collaboration between Mistral AI and Nvidia around the Mistral NeMo model, illustrating the dual role - capital and infrastructure - that now characterizes the chipmaker's position in the ecosystem.
The segment of world models, where Decart positions itself, provides an additional insight into this strategy. Three months before the Decart round, World Labs, Fei-Fei Li's company, secured $1 billion in February 2026, including $200 million from Autodesk, alongside AMD, Fidelity, and Nvidia, as reported by TechCrunch on February 18. The valuation targeted by this operation, which has not been officially confirmed by the company, was $5 billion according to information published a month earlier. Nvidia thus finds itself invested in two direct competitors on the same software layer, within a few weeks of each other.
Nvidia's VC Acceleration (2022-2025)
| Indicator | 2022 | 2024 | 2025 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Direct deals (excluding NVentures) | - | 54 | ~67 | PitchBook / AI Business Weekly |
| NVentures deals | 1 | - | 30 | PitchBook / AI Business Weekly |
| Unlisted equity on balance sheet | - | $1.8B | $3.8B | SEC Filings / CNBC |
A Software Layer Optimizing Competitor Chips
Decart's offering centers around two products and a hardware optimization layer. Oasis, launched in November 2024, is a real-time video model that surpassed one million users within three days of going live, according to figures reported by SiliconAngle. The investment statement from Toyota Ventures presents Oasis as a real-time generative simulation engine and Lucy as a live video transformation tool. Above these two components, the company claims a GPU optimization layer whose selling point is its multi-hardware reach.
According to StartupWired, Decart's stack allows the use of Nvidia's competitor chips, such as Amazon Trainium and TPUs (Tensor Processing Units, AI processors developed by Google). ActuIA documented in November 2024 the rise of Trainium in AWS's strategy, with a $110 million program dedicated to university research in generative AI. In terms of performance, Decart claims, according to SiliconAngle, a reduction in video generation costs by diffusion models from several hundred or thousands of dollars per hour to less than 25 cents, and inference at 1,600 tokens per second, which is, according to Decart, eight times the sector average. These two figures remain Decart's internal claims, not audited by independent third parties - a caveat to keep in mind.
Three Years, Four Rounds, Over $450 Million
The capital trajectory is read in four tight steps. The series B round in August 2025 was for $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation; the May 2026 round pushes it to around $4 billion post-money in eight months. The total funding exceeds $450 million in less than three years, including seed and series A rounds carried out from late 2024 whose amounts have not been confirmed by the parties. On the lead investor side, Radical Ventures, based in Toronto, closed its Fund IV at $650 million in October 2025, as reported by BetaKit. The Canadian Public Pension Investment Board (CPPIB) has injected a cumulative $280 million since 2019 into Radical's vehicles, and Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li are among the LPs, another connection with World Labs.
The strategic angle on Nvidia's side remains. The "defensive portfolio" nomenclature, covering an actor capable of optimizing competitor chips, can be hypothesized, but it clashes with the documented financial mechanics of the chipmaker. According to reports citing Nvidia's regulatory filings, these investments explicitly target companies that purchase Nvidia products directly or via cloud providers: the demand-loop logic, where the injected equity returns in future GPU orders. According to PitchBook, several of Nvidia's 67 deals in 2025 were structured with future hardware purchase commitment clauses, a mechanism absent from the published terms of the Decart round. Nvidia thus finds itself a co-investor in World Labs (target valuation of $5 billion) and in Decart (4 billion), two players whose software layer also runs on non-Nvidia chips. No public NVentures filing documents this double case to date.
$3.1B → ~4B in eight months
Over $450M raised since its founding in 2023: Decart crosses each valuation milestone at a pace few AI infrastructure startups achieve so early.