AI21 Labs founders (right to left) Amnon Shashua, Ori Goshen and Yoav Shoham. (Photo Courtesy)
Israel’s AI21 Labs, a unicorn from Amnon Shashua that specializes in Natural Language Processing (NLP), is now an even bigger unicorn. The firms raised an additional $53 million from investors like Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of Intel Corporation, and Comcast Ventures, the venture capital arm of Comcast Corporation for its Series C round of funding bringing the round’s total to $208 million . The company now has a valuation of about $1.4 billion and has raised $336 million to date.
AI21 Labs became a unicorn just this past August ,when it raised $155 million in a Series C round of funding. Google, Nvidia, and Shashua all took part in the investment at that time.
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.
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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.
“The current round will fuel the growth of the company to reach our goal of developing the next level of AI with reasoning capabilities across multiple domains,” said founder and Chairman Prof. Amnon Shashua. ”We believe that the impact of AI21 Labs’ growth plans will be felt on a global scale quite soon,” he added.
“We will see an increasing shift in discussion to AI Systems that will define the next era in computing,” said AI21 Labs co-founder Yoav Shoham . By adopting a more comprehensive systems approach, our AI enriches LLMs with knowledge and reasoning, in addition to statistical inference. This enables us to define a flexible architecture with multiple LLMs, complemented by discrete knowledge and reasoning modules.”
