AI21 Labs raises $300M from Google and Nvidia to expand enterprise AI offerings – News

Israeli artificial intelligence startup AI21 Labs Ltd. has reportedly raised $300 million in Series D funding from Google LLC and Nvidia Corp. as it expands its large language model offerings and enterprise AI solutions.

The funding was first reported by Business Insider and then later confirmed by Calcalist. Neither knows what valuation the funding was raised on, but notably, AI21 had previously raised funding in 2023 on a valuation of $1.4 billion, meaning that the new raise would be on a figure higher than that.

Founded in 2017, AI21 specializes in developing large language models and natural language processing tools that are designed to augment human reasoning and communication. The company is best known for its suite of language models, including the Jamba series, which is built to handle long-context understanding and enterprise-grade applications.

The company’s Jamba flagship model family leverages a hybrid mixture-of-experts architecture that combines state-space models and transformers to boost efficiency and scalability. Offered open source under an 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.

Along with its core models, AI21 offers a suite of consumer-facing and enterprise tools with products such as Wordtune, which helps users write and rewrite text with improved clarity, tone and intent, along with summarization and AI-generated content suggestions via extensions.

For developers and enterprise customers, the company offers AI21 Studio, a platform that allows for the integration of its language models into custom applications. Studio supports multiple deployment options, including on-premises and virtual private cloud environments, allowing companies to maintain control over data privacy and compliance needs.

While the full list of investors in the new round has not been disclosed, along with Google and Nvidia, previous investors in AI21 include Intel Capital Corp., Walden Catalyst Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital Ltd., SCB10X Co. Ltd., b2venture GmbH, Samsung Next Ventures, Comcast Ventures and Ahren Innovation Capital LLP.

The new round takes the amount raised by AI21 to $636 million, based on data from Tracxn.

The company was previously in the news in March when it introduced Maestro, a software system that boosts the output quality of large language models significantly. The platform also reduces the amount of work involved in mitigating large language model output errors.

Photo: AI21 Labs