Generative AI and LLM Startup AI21 Labs Raises $155M, Reaches $1.4B Valuation
AI21 Labs has raised $155 million in a Series C funding round, jumping in valuation to $1.4 billion. The investment announcement comes on the same day that AI21 launched the enhanced and expanded iteration of generative AI writing and reading assistant Wordtune for individual and enterprise customers. The round’s investors include Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Next, and founder of (Intel-acquired) Mobileye Professor Amnon Shashua, with participation from Google and Nvidia.
AI21 Unicorn
“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,” Professor Shashua said. “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.”
AI21’s generative AI portfolio includes a host of proprietary large language models, APIs, and the AI21 Studio for building generative AI apps. The company’s flagship product, Wordtune, began as a browser extension for generating text but has grown to incorporate Wordtune Read, which can summarize and analyze text, a host of rhetorical Spices, an iOS mobile app controllable by Siri, and Google Docs plug-in, even before the new version debuted. The new Wordtune platform encompasses features to draw both individuals and enterprises. It offers the ability to create templates for business documents, summarize information from mixed media (like a video and a document), and answer queries by drawing on linked databases, with citations included in the response. AI21 has raised $283 million in total, with the new money essentially doubling previous investments and rocketing AI21 to its new $1.4 billion valuation.
“Generative AI is driving a new era of computing across every industry,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. “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.”
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