AI21 Labs Secures $155M Funding Boost for Enterprise Generative AI

0:00So the big headline here is the fact that AI21 Labs has just raised$155 million to accelerate generative AI for the enterprise. Now, this is often called kind of an OpenAI or ChatGPT competitor. And I think what's really interesting here is that this is actually a Tel Aviv-based leader in large language models. And this is actually their series C round of funding that they have essentially just closed. So the goal here is really aiming to expedite the growth of their text-based generative AI services for enterprise clients. I think the significant capital injection evaluates the company at around$1.4 billion after the close of this round, which is very impressive.

0:43We're not seeing a ton of companies doing this. There are a handful, but they're definitely pushing this past unicorn status and they're in the big leagues now. So I think the roster of investors participating in this funding round is noteworthy. They have investors, they have Alden Catalyst, Patango, as well as strategic investors, including SCB10X, B2 Ventures, and Samsung Next. So tech giants like Google and NVIDIA also contributed to the round along with individual investor Amnon Shesua. So I think what's really interesting, this company was actually just established, AI21 Labs, back in 2017.

1:25And they have a team of really solid AI trailblazers in there. And they have been instrumental in essentially democratizing generative AI, or a lot of people say that about them in any case. So despite their early achievements, the company has been navigating an increasingly competitive landscape, often being compared to rivals such as OpenAI. Following a$64 million Series B last year, you have Shoham, an emeritus professor of AI at Stanford University, observed at the market for LLMs and multi model models was growing more saturated. He acknowledged this evolving landscape in an interview with VentureBeat, saying that the company is, quote, very aware of the environment and not complacent in any way.

2:11So AI21 Labs technology is really kind of underpinned by its proprietary Jurassic 2 foundation models, which stand as some of the largest and most advanced LLMs globally. And these models fuel AI21 Studio, which is a developer platform designed for crafting custom text-based business applications, and WordTune, which is a multilingual AI-powered reading and writing assistant targeted at professionals and general consumers. So I think the thing to kind of note here with AI21 and their angle on this is they're really kind of focused on the enterprise. And I think up until now, that was a business model that, in my opinion, could fly right that's like yeah you know open ai is really kind of targeting chat gpt for everyone this is more for like the enterprise and i'm sure they have special like security and accuracy things for the enterprise but i think now with uh open ai kind of pivoting a little bit and making a lot more enterprise products specifically chat gpt enterprise i've seen a ton of excitement enthusiasm and interest um from enterprises and getting that integrated i'm sure that ai21 is facing a lot more competition right now.

3:21Something that I think is really interesting, and I know everyone has different approaches to business, but one thing I've seen OpenAI do successfully, I've seen other companies like Canva do it, is they essentially focus on the masses first. If you can get mass market adoption with something, it makes it a lot easier to move to the enterprise because as some tweets that I was recently seeing from people talking about ChatGPT Enterprise said, they were essentially like tallying up how many people in their company were already using ChatGPT. They're like, yeah, we already have, you know, 20 people that are personally paying for chat GPT in our company.

3:51Let's just get, you know, chat GPT enterprise. We get more security and, you know, then we don't have to make our employees pay for a software that they're using for work. And plus, then we can have a kind of secure. We're not worried about any company data leaking, yada, yada. But the point being that it started out as the masses. So their employees were using anyways. And then it moved up to the enterprise because, you know, the employees saw the value in it. And so I think there's some, of course, that's harder to do because hitting the masses and getting the scale that ChatGPT got is very difficult to replicate.

4:21But if possible, you know, you saw the same thing with Canva, how they were a very simple tool that like I remember using in college for simple graphic design stuff that when I got my first corporate job, I got everyone in the company using Canva because they had already, they'd made team features and corporate features and had a whole bunch of really more sophisticated stuff. but it was a very simple way so start with the masses if you get some mass adoption product market fit then i think it's quite a lot easier to move it into into the enterprise versus something like it would appear ai21 labs concept here is like we're going straight to the enterprise because if you're only in the enterprise um and you are not able to get that mass market adoption that perhaps product market fit um it's a little bit difficult to go the other way around so in any case, I think AI21 Labs technology is quite impressive.

5:09The chairman, Amarin Shusa, elaborated on the company's vision in a press release saying, AI21 Labs is a pure play in AI as it develops and owns foundation models, which are served as a platform to developers and enterprise while developing derivatives such as WordTune directly to end users. The current round fuels the growth for the company to reach its goal of developing the next level of AI with the capabilities of reasoning across many domains we believe that the impact of ai21 labs growth plans would be of global scale and quite soon so i mean it appears that right here they're they're looking for the global scale they're looking for the mass market they said quite soon i'm not sure how soon that is um it's not it's to be honest it's like i've never used word tune or any of their products to date so perhaps it's great i'll definitely have to test it out but i think you know times a ticking and if they really want to get that that mass growth they're gonna have to either do something like very different or have it be like very cheap which is hard to compete because chad chippity is also free like they got to find some really unique angles that other people are not doing because they're not super late to the game but if they've had this technology in the bag for a long time they probably should have released this to the public sometime when chad chippity released to not you know get super left behind similar to what anthropic did i think Anthropik did a great job of not getting super left behind, even though Claude is only available on the Po2 platform.

6:32I know a ton of people that have seen a couple different features in Claude, Anthropik's Claude chatbot that ChatGPT didn't do, namely that it has way bigger context windows, so you can put way more text in there. That's super useful, and I literally use it for that sometimes. Sometimes I paste a bunch of stuff into ChatGPT, they're like, your prompt's too long, so I'm like, okay, whatever, I go over to Claude and use it. And so, good move on, good move on anthropic squad a lot of people know it and have tested it and i think they have a bright future because they were able to get in early so i do hope that ai21 uh really starts thinking about that and making sure that uh they're they're going because you know time's a ticking and the time to capitalize on this is definitely now so echoing the optimism about ai21 lab's trajectory jensen huang who's the founder and ceo of nvidia uh commented in the same press release saying generative ai is driving a new era of computing across every industry the innovative work by AI21 Labs team will help enterprises accelerate productivity and efficiency with generative AI-based systems that are accurate, trustworthy, and reliable.

7:34So I think in terms of its industry reach, AI21 Labs has been working with a bunch of different customers across various sectors. So they have Carrefour, Clairvatt, eBay, Guesty, Monday.com, Ubisoft. And so I think the company's recently has kind of earned a spot on the inaugural CB Insight Gen AI 50 list, which is, you know, recognizing its impact on general intelligence or artificial intelligence. So I think it's gonna be interesting to see where they go. You know, I've already I've already mentioned my opinion on a lot of it. But I think there's definitely hope for them. I think they just got to start pushing the envelope and get known to more of a broader user base.