AI21 Labs closes $300M Series D

Multiple outlets reported in early May 2025, citing Business Insider’s initial account, that the Israeli language-model developer AI21 Labs had closed a $300 million Series D funding round led by Google and Nvidia, taking its total capital raised to roughly $636 million against a valuation last set at $1.4 billion in a 2023 round. Coverage tied the raise to AI21’s pivot away from competing on frontier model scale and toward enterprise reliability tools built around its Jamba model family and its Maestro orchestration layer, sold to customers including Capgemini and Wix.

No primary announcement from AI21 itself accompanied the reports, and none followed. Eight months later, Calcalist reported that the round “was never closed, never formally announced, and never reflected in the company’s capital structure” — that AI21’s last completed fundraising remained the November 2023 Series C extension, and that the widely repeated $300 million figure described a deal Google, Nvidia and AI21 had discussed but not completed. By the time that correction ran, Nvidia was reportedly in advanced talks to acquire AI21 outright for $2–3 billion, a deal AI21 subsequently denied was under negotiation.

The episode is a case of a funding figure entering wide circulation through secondary reporting and being treated as settled fact for the better part of a year before the company’s own capital records contradicted it.