Organisation
AI21 Labs
An Israeli lab, among the first outside OpenAI to sell a large language model via API; later shifted to its hybrid Jamba architecture and enterprise reliability tools.
AI21 Labs is an Israeli company, founded in 2017, that was among the first outside OpenAI to offer a large language model to developers through a commercial API, releasing its Jurassic-1 models in 2021 at a scale then rivalling GPT-3. It has since moved away from competing on sheer model size, shifting toward its Jamba family — which combines the transformer design with an alternative "state-space" architecture — and enterprise reliability tools sold to corporate customers. Its recent history also illustrates how loosely reported AI finance can be: a widely cited $300 million funding round in 2025 was later said by the Israeli outlet Calcalist never to have actually closed, even as Nvidia was reported to be weighing an acquisition of the company, which AI21 denied.
- Category
- Frontier & foundation-model labs
- Founded
- 2017
- HQ
- Tel Aviv, IL
- Funding
- Reported $300m Series D (2025) later said by Calcalist never to have closed
- Key people
- Ori Goshen, Yoav Shoham, Amnon Shashua
Appears alongside
Featured in threads
Tracks
- Models & capabilities 3
- Money & business 2
- Open weights & ecosystem 2
AI21 Labs closes $300M Series D
Business Insider first reported the round on 10 May; Calcalist reported eight months later that it had never actually closed or been formally announced.
Money & business
AI21 Labs releases Jamba 1.5
Two sizes — a 94B and a 12B active-parameter mixture-of-experts model — built on AI21's Mamba-Transformer hybrid, both offering a 256K-token context window.
Models & capabilities · Open weights & ecosystem
AI21 Labs releases Jamba, a hybrid SSM-Transformer model
Combining Mamba state-space layers with transformer attention, it handled a 256K-token context and fit on a single 80GB GPU, which AI21 said pure transformers could not match.
Models & capabilities · Open weights & ecosystem
Amazon launches Bedrock
Bedrock offered API access to models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI alongside Amazon's own unreleased Titan models, rather than a single house model.
Money & business
AI21 Labs releases Jurassic-1
Jurassic-1 Jumbo's 178 billion parameters slightly exceeded GPT-3's, and its 250,000-token vocabulary — five times GPT-3's — aimed to cut per-word token costs.
Models & capabilities