Israeli generative artificial intelligence (AI) project AI21 Labs closed a $155 million Series C funding round, valuing the company at $1.4 billion.
Among the investors: Google, Nvidia, Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Next, as well as the head of Mobileye and part-time startup co-founder Professor Amnon Shashua.
The total amount of funds raised was $283 million, thanks to which AI21 Labs became one of the largest “unicorns” in the field of generative AI.
“The current round will support the growth of the company to achieve our goal of developing the next level of artificial intelligence with reasoning capabilities in various fields,” Shashua said.
AI21 Labs was founded in 2017 in Tel Aviv and since then has been developing large language models (LLMs). In 2020, the company released the AI coding tool Wordtune.
Previously, Professor Shashua managed to sell two projects to Google: Timeful, a time management app, and Katango, a social media friends organizer.
The startup’s flagship product is AI21 Studio, a platform for creating business applications based on Jurassic’s text-generating AI model.
The co-founder of the company claims that AI21 solutions outperform the competition in many ways. He emphasized that their technologies are based on “one of the largest and most complex LMMs.” In addition, the company’s neural networks are constantly trained on updated databases.
According to The Information, OpenAI spent $540 million last year developing ChatGPT. AI21 Labs internal research estimates the cost of training generative AI with 1.5 billion parameters at $1.6 million.
Recall that in February, the media reported that Google invested $ 300 million in the Anthropic artificial intelligence project.
In May, the startup raised another $450 million. South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom later committed an additional $100 million to the company as part of a partnership.
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