AI21 Labs founders (right to left) Amnon Shashua, Ori Goshen and Yoav Shoham. (Photo Courtesy)
Israel’s AI21 Labs, a startup from Amnon Shashua that specializes in Natural Language Processing (NLP), raised $155 million in a Series C round of funding. Google, Nvidia, and Shashua all took part in the investment. The raise left the company with the coveted unicorn status with a $1.4 billion valuation.
A unicorn is a startup that has a valuation of at least $1 billion.
The raise comes just a few months after AI21 Labs entered into a deal with Amazon for its Amazon Bedrock AI tool service for “building and scaling” generative AI applications. AI21 said this will allow customers to scale their own generative AI-driven applications.
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Founded in 2017 by Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen, and Amnon Shashua, AI21 Labs helps machines speak, or communicate, depending on how you look at it. This may not sound like such an original idea. Don’t computers and systems already communicate in one way or another? The answer is yes, but the level at which they communicate and process information keeps on changing.
AI21 Labs explains that in the past decade, neural networks fueled by unprecedented volumes of data and powerful computing led to a revolution in computer vision – the ability of machines to understand and generate images. The company says that language is harder for machines than vision and requires tectonic shifts in the way we build these machines.
“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,” said Chairman Prof. Amnon Shashua. “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.”
