AI21 Labs

From its founding in 2017 to Jurassic-1

AI21 Labs was founded in November 2017 in Tel Aviv by Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen and Amnon Shashua. All three have an academic background in artificial intelligence, and Shashua is also known as a co-founder of Mobileye and OrCam, two companies covered in this encyclopedia. From the start, the company focused on building its own large language models (LLMs), in the Jurassic series, as an Israeli alternative to well-known global models such as GPT. A seed round of about $9.5 million was raised as early as January 2019. In August 2021 the company launched Jurassic-1 together with AI21 Studio, a platform that let outside developers build applications on top of its models.

A huge context window and Hebrew support

In 2024 AI21 introduced Jamba, a model that combines the Transformer architecture with the Mamba architecture (based on state-space models). The combination allows long-context processing (up to 256,000 tokens) more efficiently than a pure transformer. According to the company's documentation, the Jamba family officially supports nine languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, although the models were trained mainly on English text.

Wordtune, funding, and the first move toward AI agents

Another long-standing product, Wordtune, is an AI-based writing tool that came out as early as October 2020. It offers rephrasing and wording suggestions in real time, and it predates the company's turn to building its own large-scale language models. (The company stopped developing it in April 2025, as part of a narrowing of product lines that widened in 2026.) AI21 raised substantial funding from leading investors, including Google and Nvidia, who took part in a round closed in August 2023 at a valuation of about $1.4 billion. The size of that round was reported at the time as $155 million (Globes, based on the company's announcement), while later coverage (Calcalist, July 2026) gives the same round as $200 million. In September 2024 the improved Jamba 1.5 generation was added to Amazon's Bedrock service, and in March 2025 the company launched Maestro, a system for planning and orchestrating tasks for AI agents.

From 180 employees to 70: the May 2026 cuts

In May 2026 AI21 announced it was laying off about 110 of its 180 employees, a cut of about 60% of its workforce. This came after years in which it failed to raise another large funding round, despite the huge wave of investment that lifted competitors such as Mistral AI (valued at about $14 billion) and Cohere (valued at about $7 billion). The company said it was stopping development of the Jamba model family and focusing all its activity on Maestro, the enterprise agent platform it launched in March 2025, which in effect became its only remaining active product line. The announcement came after the company released Jamba2 on 8 January 2026: a family of open models under the Apache 2.0 license, in two sizes.

The Nebius deal: investment, sale, or "acqui-hire"?

The cuts came with an announcement of a commercial partnership with the cloud company Nebius, which will integrate the Maestro platform into its cloud services, and of contracts worth tens of millions of dollars with large international customers who will run the system. Reports in Calcalist described the move as an "acqui-hire" in practice: a large part of AI21's engineering team is set to move to Nebius for tens of millions of dollars, including a physical move to Nebius's offices in Tel Aviv. According to the reports, this followed months of talks originally aimed at selling the whole company for billions of dollars. Nebius officially denied it: "Nebius has agreed to license AI21's technology and we will work together to productise it in a Nebius context. There is no 'acqui-hire' and claiming otherwise is false and misleading."

2026: Shashua announces he is stepping down as chairman

In July 2026 Amnon Shashua told the company he intends to leave both his role as chairman and the board. This came nine years after he founded AI21 with Shoham and Goshen, and after he had already shifted his center of gravity to two other companies he founded, Mobileye and Mentee Robotics. A check of the company's official website found that his name had already been removed from the list of founders shown there. Shoham and Goshen continue to serve as the company's co-CEOs.