 | |
| Industry | AI |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2017; 7 years ago (2017) |
| Founder | Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen, Amnon Shashua |
| Headquarters | Tel Aviv |
| Products | Jurassic-1 Jurassic-2 Wordtune |
| Website | ai21 |
AI21 Labs is an Israeli company specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which develops AI systems that can understand and generate natural language.[1]
AI21 Labs was founded in November 2017 by Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen, and Amnon Shashua in Tel Aviv, Israel.[2][3]
In January 2019, the company raised $9.5 million from investors in a seed funding round.[4] On October 27, 2020, AI21 Labs launched its first product, Wordtune, an AI-based writing assistant that understands context and can suggest paraphrases and rewrites.[5][6][7] Google named Wordtune one of its favorite extensions of 2021.[8] In August 2021, the company launched AI21 Studio.[9][10][1] In the same month, Jurassic-1, a natural language processing system, was launched with a token vocabulary over 250,000.[11][12][13][14]
In November 2021, Walden Catalyst announced an investment of $20 Million in AI21 Labs.[15][16] Later that month, AI21 Labs completed a $25 million series A round led by Pitango First.[17] In July 2022, the company raised $64 million in a series B funding round led by Ahren with the participation of prof. Amnon Shashua, Walden Catalyst, Pitango, TPY Capital, and Mark Leslie.[9][18][19]
On January 17, 2023, AI21 Labs announced the launch of Wordtune Spices,[20] a generative AI tool that generates a range of text options that can enhance sentences.[21][1][22]
On March 9, 2023, the company announced the release of Jurassic-2, claiming it has better response times, understands more languages, and features advanced instruction following.[23]
On August 31, 2023, the company announced the closing of $155 million Series C financing round. Investors include previous participants, alongside new ones such as Google and Nvidia.[24][25]
On March 29, 2024 the company released the Jamba (language model) - an open weights large language model built on a hybrid Mamba SSM transformer using mixture of experts with up to 256k context.[26]