AI21 Labs Valued at $1.4 Billion After $155 Million Funding Round

AI21 Labs has raised $155 million in Series C funding to further develop and provide generative artificial intelligence (AI) services to businesses.

With this latest funding, AI21 Labs has now raised a total of $283 million, valuing the company at $1.4 billion, the AI and large language model (LLM) company said in a Wednesday (Aug. 30) press release emailed to PYMNTS.

The company, founded in 2017 by AI experts Amnon Shasuha, Yoav Shoham and Ori Goshen, is known for its advanced LLM and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, which it offers through user-friendly applications and application programming interfaces (APIs), the release said.

What sets AI21 Labs apart is its approach to AI systems, with the company going beyond models and focusing on building AI systems that are easy to integrate and generate reliable, trustworthy and accurate results.

One of AI21 Labs’ achievements is its proprietary Jurassic-2 foundation models, which are among the largest and most sophisticated LLMs in the world, per the release. These models power AI21 Studio, a developer platform that allows businesses to build custom text-based applications powered by AI21 Labs’ technology.

AI21 Labs also offers Wordtune, a multilingual reading and writing AI assistant, according to the press release. Wordtune understands context and meaning, allowing users to refine and generate text or quickly read and summarize text.

Shashua, the chairman of AI21 Labs, said in the release that the recent funding and advancements in generative AI demonstrate the growing importance and potential of AI in various industries. He stated, “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.”

The co-CEOs of AI21 Labs, Shoham and Goshen, emphasized the robustness, predictability and explainability of their technology.

In another recent AI-focused funding round, AI startup Hugging Face said Aug. 24 that it has raised $235 million in a Series D funding round at a $4.5 billion valuation. The company’s platform enables developers to freely share code, models and datasets.