AI21, which creates AI solutions for businesses, announced the completion of its $208 million Series C funding on Tuesday, at a valuation of $1.4 billion. The firm, which creates AI and large language models (LLMs), announced in late August that it had secured $155 million in its Series C round.
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Additional new investors include Intel Capital, Intel Corporation’s venture capital arm, and Comcast Ventures, Comcast Corporation’s venture capital arm, which have joined previously announced investors. With this fresh round of fundraising, the company’s total cash raised now stands at $336 million. It is anticipated that the corporation currently generates between $50 and $60 million in sales per year. AI21 employs over 260 people, more than doubling its employment in the last year, and aims to hire an additional 100 in 2024.
“The additional funding came in the last few weeks after the Israeli war had already begun.” In a conversation with Calcalist, Ori Goshen, co-CEO and co-founder of AI21, said, “We constantly receive inquiries from investors who want to invest.” He stressed that the hiring was not done as part of a new investment round with a greater valuation because the company pursued healthy growth rather than focused just on valuation. “Because of our nature and our primary focus on the business market, we are less noisy than our competitors.” This market is advancing towards mainstream adoption and implementation of GenAI technologies, and nearly every Fortune 500 business is in talks with us. Most businesses will likely deploy these solutions within the next two years.
The “noise” Goshen refers to is essentially the ongoing crisis at OpenAI, the key participant in the area responsible for ChatGPT, since last Friday, with the departure of CEO and co-founder Sam Altman. The drama is far from ended, adding to the already high level of interest in these companies. AI21 is a formidable contender among the restricted set of businesses actively deploying language models, although it is the least valued. Along with OpenAI, Cohere and Anthropic are other players in this industry, with the latter having secured a $4 billion funding commitment from Amazon. It also obtained a $2 billion financial pledge from Google a few weeks ago, according to recent reports. “Because it involves hardware, Amazon’s investment in Anthropic has no bearing on our collaboration with Amazon.” “Our field is large enough that the number of players isn’t an issue; we’re not playing a zero-sum game,” Goshen maintains.AI21 Labs was one of the first to introduce generative AI to the masses, founded in 2017 by Prof. Amnon Shashua, co-founder of Mobileye, Prof. Yoav Shoham, and Goshen. Text-based generative AI services powered by powerful LLM and natural language (NLP) technology are used by both consumers and Fortune 100 corporations.
AI21’s patented Jurassic-2 foundation models are among the largest and most sophisticated LLMs in the world. Jurassic-2 abilities Wordtune, a multilingual reading and writing AI assistant for professionals and consumers, and AI21 Studio, a developer platform for constructing unique text-based commercial applications based on AI21’s language models.
The AI21 Studio platform gives developers and organizations API access to top-tier natural language processing (NLP) solutions driven by AI21’s language models. The platform’s Task-Specific Models, also known as optimized Language Models (LLMs), are designed to excel in specific natural language processing (NLP) skills.
AI21 also announced on Tuesday that Tom Nides, the current US Ambassador to Israel, had been appointed to the company’s board of directors. Nides will be the organization’s first independent director. Nides has extensive experience in the financial industry, having served as Deputy Secretary of State for management and resources under the Obama administration. He spent the majority of his career with Morgan Stanley, one of the top banks in the United States, in various jobs. In his most recent job, he was the bank’s deputy chairman, and before that, he was the Chief Operating Officer (COO).
