AI21 LABS

In 2017, Amnon Shashua had just helped sell Mobileye to Intel for $15.3 billion. He did not retire.

He teamed up with Stanford AI professor Yoav Shoham and entrepreneur Ori Goshen to start AI21 Labs in Tel Aviv. The name is a nod to the idea that the 21st century is where AI and humans work side by side.

Their first model, Jurassic-1, launched in 2021 with 178 billion parameters. That was bigger than OpenAI's GPT-3 at the time.

They were early. They just were not American, so far fewer people noticed.

AI21 sells access to its language models to businesses. Companies pay to use the models through an API or build their own apps on top of them.

The money comes from enterprises that need AI to read and write text. Think customer service, document analysis, and search.

It also ran Wordtune, a consumer writing assistant that rewrites your clunky sentences. Basically, AI21 sells the brain and other companies build the body around it.

Jamba is the flagship. It is an open-weights model built on a hybrid Mamba-transformer design with a 256,000-token context window.

Jurassic-1 and Jurassic-2 were its earlier large language models. Wordtune is a consumer writing assistant that rewrites and sharpens your sentences.

Maestro is its newer AI planning system aimed at complex enterprise tasks.

AI21 leaned into the enterprise while everyone else chased consumer hype. It launched Wordtune in 2020, a writing tool that pulled in millions of users and proved the tech worked in the real world.

Then it pivoted hard toward selling models to big companies. The 2024 release of Jamba was the real move.

It used a hybrid Mamba-transformer design that could hold 256,000 tokens of context, far more than most rivals could manage at the time. The bet was that clever architecture, not just raw size, would win enterprise deals.

The hard part is obvious. AI21 is a small Israeli company fighting OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

All three have far more money and far more attention. Training foundation models costs a fortune and the price of using them keeps falling every year.

To survive, AI21 has to be genuinely better at something specific, like long-context enterprise work. Being early is not the same as being remembered.

The heavy hitters showed up. Google and Nvidia both invested, and the 2023 Series C valued AI21 at $1.4 billion.

Then Nvidia and Alphabet led a $300 million Series D in 2025. When the company that makes the chips and the company that owns search both back you, it means they see you as strategic, not just another startup on a pitch deck.