Israeli Startup AI21 Labs Raises $64M At $664M Valuation

AI21 Labs, the natural language processing-as-a-service company behind AI language apps Wordtune and Wordtune Read, announced on Tuesday the completion of a $64 million Series B funding round.

The round brings the company’s total valuation to $664 million.

The round was led by Ahren Innovation Capital Fund with participation from existing investors, including Professor Amnon Shahua, a co-founder of the company, Walden Catalyst, Pitango, TPY Capital, and Mark Leslie.

The company has raised $118 million in total.

The funding will be used to invest in R&D and recruit new employees. 

“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,” said Ori Goshen, co-founder, and co-CEO. “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.”

AI21 Labs specializes in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and has built AI21 Studio, an NLP-as-a-Service developer platform where developers can build text-based applications like virtual assistants, chatbots, text simplification, and content moderation, creative writing, and more. AI21 Studio also features the company’s newest product, Jurassic-X, an advanced natural language processing system. 

The AI startup was founded by serial entrepreneurs Prof. Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen and Prof. Amnon Shashua, whose mission is to reimagine the way we read and write by making the machine a thought partner to humans

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.

“NLP has reached a critical inflection point and AI21 has developed unique infrastructure and products to successfully serve a large and rapidly growing market” said Alice Newcombe-Ellis, Founding and General Partner of Ahren. “We consider this team to be of the highest caliber, both technically and commercially, leading a differentiated company in a transformative space