AI21

AI21 Labs was founded in 2017 by Yoav Shoham, Uri Shamir, and Amnon Shashua — wait, the confirmed founders are Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen, and Amnon Shashua. The company is headquartered in Tel Aviv and is one of the prominent generative AI companies to emerge from Israel. It is privately held and has raised funding from investors including Google and Nvidia.

AI21 Labs develops large language models (LLMs) under the Jurassic family and offers access to them via API for developers and enterprises. Its products target companies that want to embed natural-language processing capabilities — writing, summarization, question-answering — into existing products and workflows. Alongside the models, the company offers a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) platform and a consumer-facing writing tool called Wordtune.

Wordtune is a text rewriting and improvement tool aimed at individual users and small businesses, available as a browser extension and web application. The Jurassic models are accessible through the AI21 Studio API and are targeted at developers and enterprises building language-powered applications. The company also offers enterprise deployment options supporting private-environment model hosting.

AI21 Labs competes with OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and Mistral in the LLM-as-a-service market. Its differentiation includes emphasis on efficiency relative to model size and enterprise-grade data control. The broader LLM market is under significant pricing pressure as compute costs fall and open-weight models proliferate.

The company's primary R&D center is in Tel Aviv. The founders are Israeli; Yoav Shoham is a professor at Stanford who returned to entrepreneurial activity. AI21 Labs typically hires in Israel for ML research, NLP engineering, and software development roles.