Coinspeaker
AI Startup AI21 Labs Raises $155M in Series C Funding Round
AI21 Labs, a Tel Aviv-based AI lab and product startup, has raised $155 million in a Series C funding round that was led by such companies as Walden Catalyst Management LLC, Pitango VC, SCB10X Co Ltd, b2venture, Samsung Next, as well as Google LLC and NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA). The funding round has brought the company’s total capital to $283 million and valued the AI startup at $1.4 billion.
Yoav Shoham, AI21 Labs’ co-founder, commented:
“AI21 Labs came out of stealth in October 2020 with our first launch of [AI writing tool] Wordtune. Since then, we’ve only managed to grow, more than doubling our workforce with plans to add even more employees.”
AI21 Labs is planning to use the money raised for developing AI products that will compete with ChatGPT developer OpenAI and AI safety and research company Anthropic.
AI21 Labs’ Chairman Amnon Shashua said:
“AI21 Labs is a pure play in AI as it develops and owns foundation models which are serve as a platform to developers and enterprises, while developing derivatives, such as Wordtune, directly to end users.”
He further added:
“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.”
Series C funding round has been the fifth round conducted by the company. AI21 Labs’ first funding round took place back in June 2019. In July 2022, AI21 raised a $64 million Series B at a $664 million valuation.
About AI21 Labs
AI21 Labs specializes in developing AI systems with an unprecedented capacity to understand and generate natural language. Founded in 2017, AI21 Labs aims to reimagine the way humans read and write by integrating machines into their lives. Its key products include Grande – a high-quality, affordable language model, Jurassic-X – the Modular Reasoning, Knowledge, and Language (MRKL) system, Wordtune – the first AI-based writing assistant to understand the context and meaning of the text, as well as AI21 Studio – the company’s flagship product.
AI21 Studio is a pay-as-you-go developer platform for building custom text-based business apps off of AI21’s proprietary text-generating AI models, including its cutting-edge Jurassic-1 and Jurassic-2 models. Basically, AI21 Studio allows users to employ state-of-the-art language models to build their own applications.
Recently, AI21 Labs partnered with Amazon’s Bedrock, a new service offering customers an accessible way to build generative AI-powered apps via pre-trained models. The strategic partnership will allow the startup to expand its user base and strengthen its position in the AI marketplace.
