AI21 Labs, a pioneer in large language model artificial intelligence, has closed a $155 million Series-C funding that brings the Tel Aviv-based firm’s total raise to $283 million for a valuation of $1.4 billion. Investors include Google, Nvidia, Samsung Next, Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB 10X, b2venture, and AI21 co-founder Amnon Shashua. The company is best known for its flagship AI21 Studio product, a developer platform that lets customers pay as they go to build custom text-based business apps using AI21’s proprietary models, notably Jurassic-2. The firm’s portfolio also includes the multilingual reading and writing assistant Wordtune.

“This announcement marks yet another major milestone in our journey to bring reliable generative AI to the enterprise, equipping businesses with useful and innovative natural language solutions based on our industry-leading LLMs and neurosymbolic systems,” the AI21 partners said in an announcement.

AI21 was formed in 2017 by a cadre of leading computer scientists. The company “has some notable founders,” according to SiliconANGLE. Shashua, a professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also co-founded Mobileye, a self-driving car technology supplier purchased by Intel for $15.3 billion.

Chief Executive Yoav Shoham, a Stanford professor emeritus, is a renowned AI expert who founded two companies bought by Google. Ori Goshen was among the creators of crowdfunding platform CrowdX Ltd.

“The startup’s mission is to shift and shape the way people read and write by making AI a ‘thought partner’ to humans, and to achieve that it has created a number of NLP-based applications,” SiliconANGLE writes.

The company focuses on enterprise clients, including Amazon, which made AI21 Labs a launch partner for its generative AI development platform, Bedrock. Other customers include Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP. Samsung uses it in its Bixby voice assistant, and Nvidia is using AI21 NLP capabilities to bolster its deep learning efforts, including self-driving car AI.

Despite that robust portfolio, “AI21 Labs is at a funding disadvantage,” writes TechCrunch, noting “OpenAI has raised $11.3 billion to date, while Anthropic and Cohere have raked in $1.6 billion and $435 million, respectively.”

Related:
Meet Aleph Alpha, Europe’s Answer to OpenAI, Wired, 8/30/23