AI21 Labs raises $155M to accelerate generative AI for enterprises

Tel Aviv, Israel-based giant language mannequin (LLM) chief AI21 Labs confirmed with VentureBeat that it has has closed $155 million in collection C funding to accelerate the expansion of its text-based generative AI companies for enterprises. The firm is now valued at $1.4 billion.

Investors within the spherical embody Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Next and Amnon Shashua with participation from Google and Nvidia. 

AI21 is commonly cited as a rival to OpenAI

Founded in 2017 by AI pioneers and know-how veterans Amnon Shasuha, Yoav Shoham and Ori Goshen, AI21 Labs might have been one of many first to deliver gen AI to the plenty, however it has additionally spent the previous 12 months chasing LLM rivals like OpenAI to industrial functions.

After a $64 million collection B spherical final 12 months, Shoham, an emeritus professor of AI at Stanford University, instructed VentureBeat that he acknowledged that the funding panorama was tightening and extra LLMs and multimodal fashions had been being launched daily — from OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Google’s Imagen to at present’s BLOOM announcement from Hugging Face.

He stated the corporate was “very aware of the environment and not complacent in any way.” 

AI21’s proprietary Jurassic-2 basis fashions are thought-about a few of the world’s largest and most refined LLMs. Jurassic-2 powers AI21 Studio, a developer platform for constructing customized text-based enterprise functions off of AI21’s language fashions; and Wordtune, a multilingual studying and writing AI assistant for professionals and customers.

AI21 develops and owns basis fashions that function platform

AI21 chairman Shashua stated in a press launch: “AI21 Labs is a pure play in AI as it develops and owns foundation models which are served as a platform to developers and enterprises, while developing derivatives such as Wordtune directly to end users. The current round fuels the growth of the company to reach its goal of developing the next level of AI with the capabilities of reasoning across many domains. We believe that the impact of AI21 Labs growth plans would be of a global scale and quite soon.”

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, additionally shouted out AI21’s work within the press launch: “Generative AI is driving a new era of computing across every industry,” he stated. “The innovative work by the AI21 Labs team will help enterprises accelerate productivity and efficiency with generative AI-based systems that are accurate, trustworthy and reliable.”

AI21 has lately collaborated with clients in various sectors, together with Carrefour, Clarivate, eBay, Guesty, Monday.com and Ubisoft. The firm was additionally named on the primary ever CB Insights GenAI 50.

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