Decart’s new world model can simulate hours of photorealistic driving — with some caveats

AI startup Decart on Wednesday unveiled Oasis 3, its latest interactive world model that can generate photorealistic driving environments in real time, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The model is currently available via API.

The startup is initially targeting autonomous vehicle companies that need to simulate rare driving scenarios at scale, and plans to expand into robotics and other physical AI applications. But the bigger bet is on developers: By offering API access from day one, Decart is trying to build a developer ecosystem around world models much like how OpenAI did with language models.

“It’s going to be the first usable world model that people can actually program on top of,” Dean Leitersdorf, co-founder and CEO of Decart, told TechCrunch. “I think there’s going to be an entire developer community that emerges on top of this.”

The startup already has a community of more than 100,000 developers, many of whom are building products on top of its real-time video model Lucy, largely in e-commerce and livestreaming. Oasis 3 is based on that foundation model, and it represents the company’s push into physical AI. Access is priced at $0.02 per second, and enterprise pricing depends on use cases, Decart said.

Decart is playing in an increasingly packed world model arena. Last year, Google released Genie 3 in research preview, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs launched Marble for commercial use cases, and video generation startups like Luma and Runway are also translating their physics-aware video models into world models.

Oasis 3’s release comes a few weeks after two-year-old Decart raised $300 million, which Leitersdorf says followed “huge demand increases for the models we built” in e-commerce, livestreaming, and physical AI. The round boosted Decart’s valuation to nearly $4 billion, and brought a series of strategic investors such as Toyota, Adobe, and eBay. All of these companies are potential customers, says Leitersdorf. Nvidia, an existing investor, also participated in the round.

Oasis 3’s edge lies in the photo-realism of its models and infinite generation capability. That’s due to some efficiency wizardry on Decart’s part, powered by the company’s other main product: the DOS (Decart Optimization Stack) software that allows models to run efficiently on Nvidia, Amazon, and Google hardware, making its models far less expensive to run than competitors.

“This is built on top of our entire real-time stack, which we optimize all the way down to the hardware,” Leitersdorf said. “By being so vertically integrated, we’re able to be more than an order o