Generative AI startup AI21 becomes a unicorn with a $1.4 billion valuation

Israeli generative AI project AI21 Labs has closed a Series C financing round of $155 million, valuing the company at $1.4 billion.

Investors include Google, Nvidia, Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Next, as well as Amnon Shashua, the head of Mobileye and co-founder of the startup.

Total funds raised amount to $283 million, making AI21 Labs one of the largest unicorns in generative AI.

“The current round will help the company grow to achieve our goal of developing the next level of artificial intelligence with reasoning capabilities across various fields,” said Shashua.

AI21 Labs was founded in 2017 in Tel Aviv and since then has worked on developing large language models (LLMs). In 2020 the company released Wordtune, an AI code-writing tool.

Earlier, Shashua had sold Google two projects: Timeful, a time-management app, and Katango, a social-network friend organizer.

The startup’s flagship product is AI21 Studio—a platform for building business applications based on the Jurassic text-generating AI model.

The co-founder says AI21’s solutions outperform competitors on many aspects. He noted that their technologies are built on \”some of the largest and most complex LMMs.\” In addition, the company’s neural networks are continually trained on up-to-date databases.

According to The Information, last year OpenAI spent $540 million on developing ChatGPT. AI21 Labs’ internal studies estimate training costs for a generative AI with 1.5 billion parameters at $1.6 million.

In February, reports said that Google invested $300 million in the Anthropic AI project.

In May the startup raised another $450 million. Later, the South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom allocated additional $100 million to the company under the partnership.