When Google launched in 1998, there were already more than a dozen other search engines active. But just two years later it was the largest in the world. How did Google’s team win? Conventional wisdom tends to focus on PageRank, the algorithm that made their results more relevant than competitors’ – and on the site’s minimalist user interface, while others were packed with portals and ads.

But perhaps even more important were the team’s achievements in distributed systems and low-level performance optimization. While others were buying up expensive Sun Microsystems servers, Google was figuring out how to squeeze more juice from the same consumer hardware people had at home. They ultimately gained an exponential cost advantage and were able to build a faster, better product.

As a leading Series A investor, Sequoia had a front-row seat to that success. Today we see the potential for a similar arc in Decart.

AI allows our imaginations to interact with our screens in ways (and at a speed) we’ve never seen before. But today, that potential is still limited by hardware. So last year, Decart co-founders Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev set out to tackle that problem and started hacking away at training and inference optimization. They quickly improved the state of the art, built a platform and launched a successful entrepreneurial business. And now, like Google before them, they are applying these infrastructure innovations to build beautiful AI-generated experiences. Built on the first real-time video model for inference, Oasis is just the beginning.

Decart is one of the most technically gifted teams we have ever worked with. While concurrently serving in the IDF’s elite Unit 8200, he obtained his Ph.D. from Technion, Israel’s most prestigious technical university, at just 23 years old. At the Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, the world’s largest distributed computing conference, Dean’s dissertation won first place.

Moshe is an outlier in his own right. He held key positions at Unit 8200, worked directly with top special operations leaders and developed a reputation as a trusted problem solver and executor who can connect the dots between ideas and reality. “Every time we had a problem that we didn’t know how to deal with,” one reference told us, “we called Moshe.” He and Dean worked closely together in the IDF for several years before collaborating on the biggest unsolved challenges in AI.

From our first walk with Dean in the Bay Area, where he spends half his time, to meeting the full team in Tel Aviv, where Decart is based, they blew us away with their technical depth and new insights. We are grateful for the opportunity to lead their seed round and support their continued growth.

Today’s launch of Oasis, powered not by a gaming engine but by a single AI model trained on videos, marks a milestone in the conclusion. But as remarkable as it is, it’s just a taste of what’s to come. Dean, Moshe and their team are moving fast and continuing to innovate on Decart’s infrastructure stack. Just as Google’s team did decades ago, we believe they can realize even greater efficiencies in the coming months — and with those advances, usher in the next chapter of AI-generated experiences.