AI21 Labs, an Israeli artificial intelligence startup, has reportedly raised $300 million in a Series D funding round led by Google LLC and NVIDIA Corporation. The investment aims to expand its large language model offerings and enterprise AI solutions.
The funding was first reported by Business Insider and later confirmed by Calcalist over the weekend. While the exact valuation remains undisclosed, AI21 was previously valued at $1.4 billion in 2023, suggesting that this new round likely places the company at a significantly higher valuation.
Founded in 2017, AI21 focuses on developing advanced large language models and natural language processing tools designed to enhance human reasoning and communication capabilities. The company is renowned for its suite of language models, including the Jamba series, which is tailored for long-context understanding and enterprise-grade applications.
The flagship Jamba model series utilizes a hybrid expert architecture, combining state space models with transformers to boost efficiency and scalability. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, Jamba supports context windows of up to 256,000 tokens, making it ideal for complex use cases such as summarization, legal document analysis, and research-intensive tasks.
Beyond its core models, AI21 offers a range of tools for both consumers and businesses. One example is Wordtune, which helps users write and rewrite text with improved clarity and intent. It also provides features like summarization and AI-generated content suggestions through extensions.
For developers and enterprise clients, the company provides AI21 Studio, a platform enabling seamless integration of its language models into custom applications. Studio supports various deployment options, including on-premises and virtual private cloud environments, giving companies full control over data privacy and compliance requirements.
Although the complete list of investors in this latest round has not been disclosed, early backers of AI21 include Intel Capital, Walden Catalyst Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital Ltd., SCB 10X Co., Ltd., b2venture Ltd., Samsung Next Ventures, Comcast Ventures, and Ahren Innovation Capital LLP, in addition to Google and NVIDIA.
According to data from Tracxn, this recent funding brings AI21’s total capital raised to $636 million.
The company last made headlines in March with the launch of Maestro, a software system designed to significantly improve the output quality of large language models while reducing the effort required to mitigate errors in their outputs.
