Former Unit 8200 commander Yossi Sariel joins AI unicorn Decart
The appointment as a management member links the intelligence chief who resigned after the October 7 failure to one of Israel’s fastest-growing startups.
Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, the former commander of Israel’s elite intelligence Unit 8200 who resigned after the October 7 Hamas attack, has joined the management of Israeli artificial intelligence company Decart, a fast-growing unicorn founded by two of his former subordinates.
Decart confirmed that Sariel has taken a management seat. Both of the company’s founders previously served under him in Unit 8200. Moshe Shalev, Decart’s co-founder and chief product officer, spent 13 years in the unit, ultimately becoming the right-hand man to Sariel when he commanded it.
The move is striking not only for the personal ties involved but also for its symbolism. Sariel stepped down in December 2024, accepting responsibility for what he described as a profound intelligence failure.
In his resignation letter to subordinates, he wrote: “Despite the information regarding Hamas’s plans, we were unable to break through our basic conceptions.” He added, “The failure of Unit 8200 is entirely on me, and I am deeply sorry.”
Unit 8200, long regarded as one of the world’s most sophisticated signals intelligence organizations, had been criticized for allegedly relying too heavily on advanced technology while neglecting traditional intelligence-gathering methods. The October 7 attack exposed those vulnerabilities in devastating fashion.
Now Sariel is re-entering the public arena through a company that embodies the very technological frontier critics say Israel’s intelligence community leaned on too heavily.
Decart was founded in late 2023 by Dr. Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, both veterans of Unit 8200. In less than a year, the company has become one of Israel’s most closely watched AI startups.
Last August, Decart raised $100 million at a valuation of $3.1 billion, its third funding round in 11 months, bringing total capital raised to $153 million. In its previous round, the company had been valued at less than $1 billion.
Despite the fundraising, Decart said it had used less than $10 million of investor capital. The company finances its tens of millions of dollars in GPU compute costs through revenue.
Decart has generated revenue from day one, signing multi-million dollar contracts to license its proprietary GPU optimization stack to cloud providers and AI laboratories. That same stack underpins its real-time video generation models.
