One artificial intelligence startup’s setback creates an opportunity for another.
For instance, today marked a significant development for AI21 Labs, a company specializing in generative AI products comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT. The company successfully secured a $53 million extension to its previously disclosed Series C funding round, with new investors Intel Capital and Comcast Ventures contributing to this additional funding. This brings the total raised by AI21 to $336 million, maintaining the startup’s valuation at $1.4 billion.
Ori Goshen, co-founder and CEO of AI21 Labs, emphasized that this injection of funds would be directed towards product development and expanding the startup’s workforce. He expressed gratitude for the support from investors, highlighting their belief in the company’s profound technological expertise. Goshen conveyed, “Mass deployment of AI requires deep understanding of high-performance language models that can deliver better value and impact. Our approach is about designing AI with purpose, making it significantly more efficient than building from scratch, and much more cost effective.”
Founded in 2017 in Tel Aviv, AI21 Labs, led by co-founders Amnon Shashua, Ori Goshen, and Yoav Shoham, focuses on creating text-generating AI tools. The company’s flagship product, AI21 Studio, serves as a pay-as-you-go developer platform for constructing customized text-based business applications utilizing AI21’s exclusive text-generating AI models. Additionally, AI21 offers Wordtune, a multilingual reading and writing AI assistant comparable to Grammarly.
AI21 Labs allows customers to access its platform through APIs for specific generative AI applications, such as summarization, paraphrasing, and grammar and spelling correction. The startup’s models support an increasing number of languages, including Spanish, German, Italian, and Dutch.
Competing with OpenAI and well-funded startups like Cohere and Anthropic in the generative AI space, AI21 Labs claims differentiation through its “more comprehensive systems approach.” Yoav Shoham, co-CEO, explained, “Our AI enriches [generative AI] with knowledge and reasoning in addition to statistical inference, enabling us to define a flexible architecture with multiple generative AI, complemented by discrete knowledge and reasoning modules.”
While the debate on the true distinctiveness of this approach persists, AI21 has gained significant customer traction. Goshen reported that several Fortune 100 companies are among AI21’s clients, with Wordtune alone boasting over 10 million users.
Notably, AI21 Labs represents Intel’s second major public investment in generative AI, with Stability AI being the other. Given Intel’s ownership of Mobileye and Amnon Shashua’s longstanding association with Intel, the strategic importance of this investment is evident. The speculation arises whether Intel, in the face of competition from chipmakers like Nvidia benefiting from the AI boom, is compelled to elevate its standing in this domain.
