Generative AI startup AI21 Labs wins $155M at a $1.4B valuation
AI21 Labs, a Tel Aviv-based startup developing a range of text-generating AI tools, raised $155 million in a Series C funding round led by Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Next and Amnon Shashua, founder of Intel-owned Mobileye and co-founder of AI21 Labs. Google and Nvidia also participated.
The tranche, which brings AI21 Labs' total raised to $283 million, values the company at $1.4 billion, slightly higher than the figure reported earlier today by The Information ( $1.2 billion).
“AI21 Labs sneaked out in October 2020 with our first launch of [AI writing tool] Wordtune,” Yoav Shoham, one of AI21 Labs co-CEOs, told TechCrunch by email. “Since then, we have only managed to grow, more than doubling our workforce and planning to add even more employees. »
AI21 Labs was founded in 2017 by Shashua, Shoham and Ori Goshen, the startup's other co-CEOs. Shoham, a Stanford professor emeritus, had previously sold two companies to Google, time-tracking app Timeful and social media organizer Katango. Goshen is also a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded and led several Israel-based tech companies, including telecommunications analytics firm Crowdx.
AI21 Labs flagship product is AI21 Studio, a paid development platform for building custom text-based business applications from AI21's proprietary text generation AI models, including its state-of-the-art Jurassic-2 model. The startup also sells access to the aforementioned Wordtune, a Grammarly-like multilingual reading and writing AI assistant.
Customers can leverage the AI21 Labs platform through APIs for specific generative AI use cases, such as summarizing, paraphrasing, and grammar and spelling correction. The startup's templates support an increasing number of languages, including Spanish, German, Italian, and Dutch.
AI21 Labs competes with a growing number of startups and incumbents in the hot field of generative AI.
Google, AWS, and Microsoft offer tools comparable to AI21 Studio, as do startups like Cohere, OpenAI, and Anthropic (and to a lesser extent marketing-focused vendors like Jasper, Regie, and Typeface). And AI21 Labs is at a funding disadvantage; OpenAI has raised $11.3 billion to date, while Anthropic and Cohere have raised $1.6 billion and $435 million, respectively.
But Shoham says AI21 Labs' solutions are superior in several ways, even if they appear similar on the surface and don't benefit from a higher R&D budget.
First, Shoham explains, they are developed on "some of the largest and most sophisticated large language models in the world" and offer "more refined control" than many generative AI applications on the walk. Additionally, they are trained on current data, unlike text generation models trained on older data, which cannot accurately answer questions about current events.
AI21 Labs, a Tel Aviv-based startup developing a range of text-generating AI tools, raised $155 million in a Series C funding round led by Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Next and Amnon Shashua, founder of Intel-owned Mobileye and co-founder of AI21 Labs. Google and Nvidia also participated.
The tranche, which brings AI21 Labs' total raised to $283 million, values the company at $1.4 billion, slightly higher than the figure reported earlier today by The Information ( $1.2 billion).
“AI21 Labs sneaked out in October 2020 with our first launch of [AI writing tool] Wordtune,” Yoav Shoham, one of AI21 Labs co-CEOs, told TechCrunch by email. “Since then, we have only managed to grow, more than doubling our workforce and planning to add even more employees. »
AI21 Labs was founded in 2017 by Shashua, Shoham and Ori Goshen, the startup's other co-CEOs. Shoham, a Stanford professor emeritus, had previously sold two companies to Google, time-tracking app Timeful and social media organizer Katango. Goshen is also a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded and led several Israel-based tech companies, including telecommunications analytics firm Crowdx.
AI21 Labs flagship product is AI21 Studio, a paid development platform for building custom text-based business applications from AI21's proprietary text generation AI models, including its state-of-the-art Jurassic-2 model. The startup also sells access to the aforementioned Wordtune, a Grammarly-like multilingual reading and writing AI assistant.
Customers can leverage the AI21 Labs platform through APIs for specific generative AI use cases, such as summarizing, paraphrasing, and grammar and spelling correction. The startup's templates support an increasing number of languages, including Spanish, German, Italian, and Dutch.
AI21 Labs competes with a growing number of startups and incumbents in the hot field of generative AI.
Google, AWS, and Microsoft offer tools comparable to AI21 Studio, as do startups like Cohere, OpenAI, and Anthropic (and to a lesser extent marketing-focused vendors like Jasper, Regie, and Typeface). And AI21 Labs is at a funding disadvantage; OpenAI has raised $11.3 billion to date, while Anthropic and Cohere have raised $1.6 billion and $435 million, respectively.
But Shoham says AI21 Labs' solutions are superior in several ways, even if they appear similar on the surface and don't benefit from a higher R&D budget.
First, Shoham explains, they are developed on "some of the largest and most sophisticated large language models in the world" and offer "more refined control" than many generative AI applications on the walk. Additionally, they are trained on current data, unlike text generation models trained on older data, which cannot accurately answer questions about current events.
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