Anthropic, the American company behind Claude, is in the final stages of buying Israeli AI startup Decart, a deal expected to create at least two new billionaires and bring one of the world’s largest AI developers into Israel for the first time.
The reason the payday is so large comes down to one number: the founders never gave away control. Dean Leitersdorf and his team still hold about 64% of Decart — roughly two-thirds of the company — worth about $4 billion on paper. With Dean’s brother Orian joining last year as chief scientist, each of the three founders stands to collect an estimated $1 billion to $1.5 billion, just below the roughly $2 billion apiece taken home by the founders of Wiz when Google bought it in March.
They could have had more. Nvidia offered $7 billion to $8 billion, more than Anthropic put on the table. Anthropic capped its bid at $6 billion and paid mostly in stock — only a few hundred million in actual cash, with the rest handed over as Anthropic shares. Decart’s shareholders took the smaller number because they expect the paper to be worth more later: Anthropic is preparing what would be the largest public offering in history, at a $2 trillion valuation, with annual revenue projected to reach $100 billion to $120 billion by year end, according to Fortune.
That choice creates a tax puzzle in Israel. The founders’ stake is valued at about NIS 12 billion, which points to roughly NIS 4.2 billion for the state at a 30% capital gains rate plus a 5% surtax. But shares are not cash. “Receiving shares in lieu of cash is subject to tax, even though the founders receive an illiquid asset,” said Racheli Guz-Lavi, head of the tax department at law firm Amit Pollak Matalon, noting that the tax event can be deferred until the shares are actually sold if certain conditions are met. If Anthropic goes public and the stock climbs, Israel eventually collects on a bigger gain; if it falls, the state collects less.Most of the investors are American — Benchmark, Sequoia, Radical Ventures and Zeev Ventures, with Michael Eisenberg’s Aleph fund holding a small Israeli piece. Those backers are expected to split more than $2 billion.
For Anthropic, the point is engineering, not just talent. Decart is expected to run as an R&D center focused on making Anthropic’s models run more efficiently across different chips — Nvidia’s graphics processors, Google’s TPUs and Amazon’s Inferentia. The company has 89 employees in Israel and 17 in the United States, and the acquisition would mark Anthropic’s first operation on Israeli soil after years of covering the market through salespeople based in Ireland. It would become the company’s second research site outside the U.S., alongside a 15,000-square-meter London center staffed by 200 people.Rival OpenAI is expanding on its own track toward a Wall Street listing, hiring senior salespeople away from Amazon’s cloud unit in the U.S. and Europe, but sources close to that company say it has no plans to open in Israel or hire anyone to run operations there.
JBizNews Desk | New York
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