Israeli deep tech company AI21 Labs announced today the completion of a $64 million series B financing round, bringing the company’s valuation to $664 million. The round was led by Ahren Innovation Capital Fund with participation from existing investors, including company cofounder Prof’ Amnon Shashua, Walden Catalyst, Pitango, TPY Capital and Mark Leslie. The current round brings the total amount raised by the company to $118 million.
The new funding will be used by A121 Labs, which is ambitiously aiming to fundamentally change the way people read and write, to invest in R&D and recruit new employees. AI21 Labs specializes in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and has built AI21 Studio, an NLP-as-a-Service developer platform. On the platform developers can build text-based applications like virtual assistants, chatbots, text simplification, content moderation, creative writing, and more. AI21 Studio also features the company’s newest product, Jurassic-X, an advanced natural language processing system.
The Tel Aviv-based startup was founded by serial entrepreneurs Prof. Yoav Shoham, CEO Ori Goshen and Prof. Amnon Shashua.
Goshen said, "We completed this round during a period of market uncertainty, which highlights the confidence our investors have in AI21's vision to change the way people consume and produce information. The funding will allow us to accelerate the company's global growth, while continuing to develop advanced technology in the field of natural language processing. We are looking forward to growing our team and our offerings."
The company has launched several products, including Wordtune, a browser extension with millions of active users that was chosen by Google as one of its favorite extensions for 2021, as well as Wordtune Read, which analyzes and summarizes documents in seconds, enabling users to read long and complex text quickly and efficiently.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 12, 2022.
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