Anthropic's acquisition of the Israeli AI startup Decart has entered its final stretch, with the parties now exchanging advanced drafts of an agreement that would value the company at approximately $7 billion, according to a report published by Calcalist on August 16, 2026. The deal, if signed, would be Anthropic's largest acquisition to date and one of the biggest AI startup purchases of the year.
The new details significantly advance the story that broke on August 13, when Bloomberg first reported that Anthropic was in talks to buy Decart for around $6 billion. According to Calcalist, most of the consideration in the deal now under discussion would be paid in Anthropic shares rather than cash — a structure that ties Decart's shareholders to the outcome of Anthropic's widely expected public listing. The transaction could be signed as soon as next month, ahead of an IPO that Calcalist reports is expected in September. For more context on this story, see our ongoing latest AI developments.
Why Decart Chose Anthropic Over a Higher Bid
The most striking revelation in the Calcalist report is that Nvidia was in advanced negotiations for Decart and is believed to have offered a higher valuation than Anthropic — partly because it was already an investor in the startup. Those talks were halted after Anthropic emerged with its offer.
The identity of the buyer ultimately mattered more than the price. Decart's founders, Dr. Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, along with Sequoia Capital, Decart's largest investor, concluded that Anthropic was best positioned to take the company into its next stage of growth, according to the report. Anthropic currently has no development center in Israel, and an acquisition would give it an entry point into the country's dense AI ecosystem.
Decart had received approaches from several potential buyers in recent months and initially chose to advance discussions with Nvidia before pivoting to Anthropic. Other names could still re-enter the picture: Calcalist notes that Google — which agreed last year to acquire Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz for $32 billion — and Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has previously considered acquiring Decart, could theoretically return to the process. Even so, sources described the chances of Anthropic completing a deal by early September as high, while stressing that no agreement has yet been signed.
A Three-Year-Old Startup, a $450 Million War Chest
Founded in 2023, Decart employs approximately 100 people and has raised $450 million to date, Calcalist reports. The company made its name in real-time AI video generation and inference efficiency — technology that would help Anthropic run its Claude models faster and more cheaply, a concern that has grown urgent as the industry's price war with Chinese model makers intensifies.
Decart has hired the boutique investment bank Catalyst to advise on the transaction. Anthropic, for its part, is being advised by J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs in connection with its planned offering.
The acquisition race also underscores how quickly Anthropic's financial position has changed. Bloomberg reported that presentations to investors showed second-quarter revenue jumped 14-fold to $11.5 billion, from $787 million in the same quarter of 2025, and that the company reached positive EBITDA for the first time. Its annualized revenue is now estimated at $47 billion, compared with approximately $40 billion for OpenAI, according to the figures cited by Calcalist — a reversal of the long-standing assumption that OpenAI would remain the revenue leader indefinitely.
What the Deal Means for Anthropic's IPO
The timing is significant. Anthropic has already submitted a confidential prospectus for a Nasdaq listing, but publication of the filing has been delayed — and Calcalist reports the Decart acquisition may have contributed to that delay. Folding a $7 billion, share-heavy acquisition into IPO paperwork is the kind of wrinkle that slows any listing process.
For investors, the strategic logic is straightforward. Anthropic has told the market a story about efficient scaling: revenue growing 14-fold, positive EBITDA, and now an attempt to buy down its own inference costs through acquisition rather than pure infrastructure spending. The $190-200 billion revenue forecast for 2028 that Reuters reported as the hinge of the company's IPO valuation assumes enormous growth in usage — and every efficiency gain Decart can deliver goes straight toward that math.
The deal would also extend a broader pattern of consolidation across the AI industry in 2026, as frontier labs use richly valued stock to absorb capability gaps — in inference, coding, and agentic tooling — faster than they could build them. SpaceX closed its acquisition of the AI coding company Cursor earlier this month, and Stripe has reportedly held talks to acquire the model marketplace OpenRouter for around $10 billion.
For Sequoia, the outcome would cap a remarkably fast return on a startup barely three years old. For Nvidia, it is a rare instance of a bid lost not on price, but on preference — a sign that in the current market, alignment with a frontier lab's trajectory can be worth more than a headline number.
