Israeli-based AI21 Labs, a leader in AI and large language models (LLMs), has snapped $155 million in a Series C funding round. Investors include Walden Catalyst (that backed ANYbotics and Peptone), Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Next, and Prof. Amnon Shashua with participation from Google and NVIDIA.
The new funding brings the company’s total capital raised to $283 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion. The fresh funds will be used to accelerate the growth of its highly accurate text-based generative AI services for enterprises. It will further strengthen AI21 Labs as a leader among generative AI unicorns.
Chairman Prof. Amnon Shashua said, “AI21 Labs is a pure play in AI as it develops and owns foundation models which serve as a platform to developers and enterprises, while developing derivatives, such as Wordtune, directly to end users. The current round fuels the growth of the company to reach its goal of developing the next level of AI with the capabilities of reasoning across many domains. We believe that the impact of AI21 Labs growth plans would be of a global scale and quite soon.”
Added co-CEOs Prof. Yoav Shoham and Ori Goshen said: “We are grateful for this vote of confidence by current and new investors. AI21 Labs’ cutting-edge technology, including leading large language models and neurosymbolic technology, provides the robustness, predictability, and explainability required in the era of AI-first enterprises. We look forward to continuing this journey with our investors, partners and customers”.
“Generative AI is driving a new era of computing across every industry,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “The innovative work by the AI21 Labs team will help enterprises accelerate productivity and efficiency with generative AI-based systems that are accurate, trustworthy, and reliable.”
Reliable AI to the enterprise
Founded in 2017 by AI luminaries Prof. Amnon Shasuha, Prof. Yoav Shoham, and Ori Goshen in Tel Aviv, AI21 Labs was one of the first to bring generative AI to the masses. AI21’s unique approach goes beyond models, building AI systems that are easy to integrate and that generate reliable, trustworthy, and accurate results with more refined control than any standalone existing model.
AI21’s proprietary Jurassic-2 foundation models are some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated LLMs. Jurassic-2 powers AI21 Studio, a developer platform for building custom text-based business applications off of AI21’s language models; and Wordtune, a multilingual reading and writing AI assistant for professionals and consumers.
The company has built a strong customer base serving consumers to Fortune 100 companies with the power of its advanced LLM and natural language (NLP) technologies through easy-to-use applications and APIs.
AI21 has established collaborations with market-leading customers in diverse sectors, among them Carrefour, Clarivate, eBay, Guesty, Monday.com and Ubisoft.
