Valued at $1.4 billion! Another unicorn emerges among OpenAI challengers.
In the face of fierce competition, AI21 Labs seeks to differentiate itself by offering models that are smaller and have lower operating costs than other startups.
In this wave of AI, emerging players continue to emerge, and OpenAI has encountered a strong competitor, "AI21 Labs".
On Thursday, according to sources cited by the technology media outlet The Information, the Israeli startup AI21 Labs raised $155 million in a new round of financing, bringing its total valuation to $1.4 billion.
In the previous round of financing, AI21 raised more than $278 million, which is the largest investment received by a large language model development company. AI21 is one of the few competitors closely watched by Google and Microsoft at the beginning of this year, and it is also the last startup company with a valuation of over $1 billion among these companies.
According to two insiders familiar with the matter, AI21 Labs achieved $20 million in revenue in 2022, and it is expected to reach $50 million in revenue this year. The majority of the company's revenue comes from Wordtune, a consumer-facing AI writing assistant. Recently, AI21 Labs launched AI text analysis and summarization features for Wordtune.
At the same time, AI21 Labs also sells access to its LLM Jurassic-1, securing a unique position in software competitions with major competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, AI21 Labs was founded in 2017 by Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen, and Amnon Shashua. The core team has extensive entrepreneurial experience. Founder Yoav Shoham was a computer science professor at Stanford University and previously founded a calendar scheduling startup that was later acquired by Google. Ori Goshen is the founder of CrowdX, a telecommunications analytics and network optimization startup, and Amnon Shashua is the founder of Mobileye, an autonomous driving company.
Currently, AI21 Labs faces fierce competition, both from proprietary model developers like OpenAI and from free and open-source models like Meta Platforms' lama 2.
AI21 Labs is trying to differentiate itself by offering models that are smaller and have lower operating costs than other startups. Goshen previously stated that the size of the model does not represent everything; what is more important is that the model can provide accurate information.