AI21 Labs was founded in 2017 by Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen, and Amnon Shashua in Tel Aviv, Israel. The company is one of the earliest dedicated large language model startups, having released its Jurassic series of models well before the ChatGPT era.
AI21 has raised over $330 million from investors including Walden Catalyst, Google, Nvidia, and Intel Capital. The company introduced the Jamba model family in 2024, which uses a novel hybrid architecture combining Transformers with Mamba (a state-space model), achieving strong performance with a 256K context window and efficient inference.
The company’s product suite includes the AI21 Studio API platform, Wordtune (a writing assistant with millions of users), and enterprise solutions for document analysis and customer support. AI21’s models are particularly strong in multilingual tasks, reflecting the team’s global perspective.
With over 300 employees, AI21 Labs has positioned itself as a leading AI company outside of Silicon Valley. Their Jamba architecture demonstrates that meaningful model innovation is happening worldwide, not just at a handful of US labs. The company serves thousands of enterprise customers who need reliable, production-ready language models.
