# AI21 labs

> AI21 is pioneering the development of enterprise AI Systems and foundation models. Our mission is to transform cutting-edge deep tech research into enterprise-ready AI systems. We offer privately deployed models with unmatched security, privacy and reliability with tailored solutions for every organization. Founded in 2017, AI21 has raised $336 million from leading investors including NVIDIA, Google and Intel.

Company page on Leadbay: https://mad-max.leadbay.ai/company/ai21.com · loaded 2026-11-03

## At a glance

- Website: https://ai21.com
- Team based in: Tel Aviv (ai21.com and 1 more)
- Founded: 2017 (ai21.com and 1 more)
- Founders: Ori Goshen, Amnon Shashua, Maykel Zayton
- Industry: Software Development
- Employees: 156 (employees and founders, investors not counted; ai21.com and 1 more)
- Total funding: $636M (ai21.com and 1 more)
- Backed by: NVIDIA, Google, Intel Capital, Samsung Next Ventures, Coatue, 8VC, Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Ahren, TPY Capital, Comcast Ventures, Mark Leslie, Prof. Amnon Shashua
- Seen in its site's code: HubSpot (js.hs-scripts.com), Google Tag Manager (googletagmanager.com/gtm.js), Google Analytics (googletagmanager.com/gtag/js), Amplitude (cdn.amplitude.com), WordPress (/wp-content/), Cloudflare (/cdn-cgi/), OneTrust (cdn.cookielaw.org), Google Workspace (MX alt2.aspmx.l.google.com), Salesforce (TXT include:_spf.salesforce.com), Atlassian (TXT atlassian-domain-verification) (read 2026-11-03)
- Email: info@ai21.com

## Why it stands out

- Wordtune named one of Google's favorite Chrome extensions of 2021 (Communicate and Collaborate category) ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI21_Labs), [prnewswire.com](https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/ai21-labs-rolls-out-wordtune-upgrade-expanding-its-generative-ai-offering-with-all-in-one-platform-301912655.html), [prnewswire.com](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ai21-labs-rolls-out-wordtune-upgrade-expanding-its-generative-ai-offering-with-all-in-one-platform-301912655.html))
- Competes with: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google (Gemini), Microsoft, Meta (Llama), Cohere, Mistral AI, AWS (Amazon Bedrock) ([giiresearch.com](https://www.giiresearch.com/report/gmi1844299-enterprise-llm-market-opportunity-growth-drivers.html), [index.dev](https://www.index.dev/blog/llm-enterprise-adoption-statistics), [avasant.com](https://avasant.com/report/generative-ai-platforms-q2-2024-radarview/))

## Products and services

- Jamba (open-weight LLM family, hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture, 256K context) ([research.contrary.com](https://research.contrary.com/report/ai21-labs), [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI21_Labs), [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/ai21))
- Jamba2 (memory-efficient open source model family, introduced Jan 2026) ([research.contrary.com](https://research.contrary.com/report/ai21-labs), [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI21_Labs), [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/ai21))
- Jurassic-1 and Jurassic-2 (earlier LLM families) ([research.contrary.com](https://research.contrary.com/report/ai21-labs), [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI21_Labs), [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/ai21))
- AI21 Studio (developer platform for accessing models via API, SDK, and cloud) ([research.contrary.com](https://research.contrary.com/report/ai21-labs), [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI21_Labs), [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/ai21))
- Maestro (AI agent planning/optimization system for RAG and knowledge agents) ([research.contrary.com](https://research.contrary.com/report/ai21-labs), [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI21_Labs), [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/ai21))
- Wordtune (AI writing assistant, consumer B2C product, 10M+ users) ([research.contrary.com](https://research.contrary.com/report/ai21-labs), [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI21_Labs), [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/ai21))
- Wordtune Read (document summarization tool) ([research.contrary.com](https://research.contrary.com/report/ai21-labs), [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI21_Labs), [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/ai21))
- Wordtune Spices (companion tool) ([research.contrary.com](https://research.contrary.com/report/ai21-labs), [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI21_Labs), [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/ai21))

## Customers and markets

- **Customers**: Capgemini (software), Lightricks (software), Jenni (software), Tweet Hunter (software), Ubisoft (entertainment), Lattitude (entertainment), Clarivate (data analytics), One Zero (fintech/digital bank), Rapyd (fintech), Tipalti (fintech), Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator (nonprofit), Educa Edtech (edtech), Easyway (hospitality), Glassdoor (HR), Fnac (retail), Auchan (retail), Monday.com (Wordtune user), eBay (Wordtune user), UiPath (Wordtune user), Wix (Maestro contract) ([research.contrary.com](https://research.contrary.com/report/ai21-labs), [app.dealroom.co](https://app.dealroom.co/news/feed/ai21-labs-cuts-staff-from-180-to-70-shifts-focus-to-ai-agent-optimisation-platform), [prnewswire.com](https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/ai21-labs-rolls-out-wordtune-upgrade-expanding-its-generative-ai-offering-with-all-in-one-platform-301912655.html))
- **Markets**: Enterprise AI-agent deployment, optimization and operating economics. ([ai21.com](https://www.ai21.com/blog/ai21-post-trains-nvidia-nemotron-35-super-vl/), [ai21.com](https://www.ai21.com/blog/introducing-jamba2/), [docs.ai21.com](https://docs.ai21.com/docs/overview))
- **Markets**: Data-intensive enterprise workflows including grounded QA, RAG, financial analysis, customer service, productivity and internal-knowledge agents. ([ai21.com](https://www.ai21.com/blog/ai21-post-trains-nvidia-nemotron-35-super-vl/), [ai21.com](https://www.ai21.com/blog/introducing-jamba2/), [docs.ai21.com](https://docs.ai21.com/docs/overview))

## Team

- Ori Goshen, Co-Founder, Co-CEO
- Amnon Shashua, Chairman & Co-Founder, also CEO of Mobileye
- Maykel Zayton, Co-Founder
- Nellie Stockhammer, Chief Financial Officer
- Or Dagan, Chief Operating Officer
- Daniel Gissin, Chief Technology Officer
- Leeor Moses-Voronov, VP of Product & Market Strategy
- Olivia Gorvy, VP B2B Marketing
- Guy Einy, VP Product
- Hila Yakobovich, VP of HR
- Barak Peleg, VP Technology and Architecture

Backed by: NVIDIA, Google, Intel Capital, Samsung Next Ventures, Coatue, 8VC, Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Ahren, TPY Capital

## Latest news

- 2026-05-18 · [AI21 cuts more than 60% of its workforce in major strategic overhaul](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rjwumhukfx) (calcalistech.com)
- 2026-05-18 · [Shashua’s AI21 Labs laying off 60% of employees](https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-shashuas-ai21-labs-laying-off-60-of-employees-1001543241) (en.globes.co.il)
- 2025-12-30 · [Nvidia in advanced talks to buy Israel's AI21 Labs for up to $3 billion, report says](https://www.reuters.com/business/nvidia-advanced-talks-buy-israels-ai21-labs-up-3-billion-report-says-2025-12-30/) (reuters.com)
- 2025-12-08 · [AI21 Labs and Fnac Darty, Partner to Drive Retail AI Transformation](https://www.accessnewswire.com/newsroom/en/computers-technology-and-internet/ai21-labs-and-fnac-darty-partner-to-drive-retail-ai-transformatio-1105472) (accessnewswire.com)
- 2025-05-07 · [How AI21 Labs Builds Frontier Models For The Enterprise, With Ori Goshen, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at AI21 Labs | Barrchives | Amplify Partners](https://www.amplifypartners.com/barrchives/how-ai21-labs-builds-frontier-models-for-the-enterprise-with-ori-goshen-co-founder-and-co-ceo-at-ai21-labs) (amplifypartners.com)

## Where to find more

- [This page in Markdown, for agents](https://mad-max.leadbay.ai/company/ai21.com.md)

## Decision makers

- [Ori Goshen](https://mad-max.leadbay.ai/person/ori-goshen--ai21.com.md), Co-Founder, Co-CEO
- [Amnon Shashua](https://mad-max.leadbay.ai/person/amnon-shashua--ai21.com.md), Chairman & Co-Founder, also CEO of Mobileye
- [Maykel Zayton](https://mad-max.leadbay.ai/person/maykel-zayton--ai21.com.md), Co-Founder
- [Nellie Stockhammer](https://mad-max.leadbay.ai/person/nellie-stockhammer--ai21.com.md), Chief Financial Officer
- [Or Dagan](https://mad-max.leadbay.ai/person/or-dagan--ai21.com.md), Chief Operating Officer
- [Daniel Gissin](https://mad-max.leadbay.ai/person/daniel-gissin--ai21.com.md), Chief Technology Officer
- [Leeor Moses-Voronov](https://mad-max.leadbay.ai/person/leeor-moses-voronov--ai21.com.md), VP of Product & Market Strategy
- [Olivia Gorvy](https://mad-max.leadbay.ai/person/olivia-gorvy--ai21.com.md), VP B2B Marketing
- [Guy Einy](https://mad-max.leadbay.ai/person/guy-einy--ai21.com.md), VP Product
- [Hila Yakobovich](https://mad-max.leadbay.ai/person/hila-yakobovich--ai21.com.md), VP of HR

Work emails and direct phones come with a Leadbay account: https://wow.leadbay.ai/?register=true

Where it comes from: 27 sites read (ai21.com, crai21.com, oumai21.com, research.contrary.com, en.wikipedia.org, linkedin.com, calcalistech.com, en.globes.co.il, …).

## Best angle

2026-10-20 · Expansion: A rented frontier model makes you one of many. But an open model post-trained on your data, built for your workflows, and compounding with every interaction you feed back into it? That’s … (1 source)

## Best way in

- Message on X: The company's own account

## Signals: what happened

- 2026-10-21 · News: Yesterday at NVIDIA GTC Berlin’s Startup Day, our Co-founder & CEO Ori Goshen joined the panel "From Agentic Breakthroughs to Product Adoption" alongside leaders from Taktile, H Company and OLIGO Security. (1 source: [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ai21_yesterday-at-nvidia-gtc-berlins-startup-activity-7518587408461037568-YAoh))
- 2026-10-20 · Expansion: A rented frontier model makes you one of many. But an open model post-trained on your data, built for your workflows, and compounding with every interaction you feed back into it? That’s … (1 source: [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ai21_a-rented-frontier-model-makes-you-one-of-activity-7518244011917156352-_-tF))
- 2026-10-15 · Partnership: Over the past three weeks, our Forward-Deployed Researchers [FDRs] collaborated with NVIDIA, Gong, Deel, and Alice (Formerly ActiveFence) to post-train NVIDIA’s recently released Nemotron 3.5 Super VL open model to deliver specialized … (1 source: [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ai21_over-the-past-three-weeks-our-forward-deployed-activity-7516513602254848000-zcth))
- 2026-10-06 · News: When an agent isn't good enough, a common instinct is to scale it. This assumes the architecture is right but just underpowered. While it usually works, it's also usually expensive 💸 (2 sources: [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ai21_when-an-agent-isnt-good-enough-a-common-activity-7513227795121012739-CY8w), [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI21_Labs))
- 2026-09-23 · Events: Last week at the AI Infra Summit, our co-Founder & CEO Ori Goshen sat down with Michael Stewart from M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund to talk about running AI agents in production and … (1 source: [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ai21_last-week-at-the-ai-infra-summit-our-co-founder-activity-7508494242068123648-ggE6))
- 2026-08-20 · News: Small models + the right verifier > bigger frontier models, alone 🏆 (1 source: [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ai21_small-models-the-right-verifier-bigger-activity-7496179540596162560-7Ezt))
- 2026-06-24 · News: We just landed on DeepResearch Bench II without building a single new agent. (1 source: [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ai21_we-just-landed-1-on-deepresearch-bench-ii-activity-7475545174576709634-rD73))
- 2026-05-18 · News: AI21 cuts more than 60% of its workforce in major strategic overhaul (1 source: [calcalistech.com](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rjwumhukfx))
- 2026-05-18 · News: Shashua’s AI21 Labs laying off 60% of employees (1 source: [en.globes.co.il](https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-shashuas-ai21-labs-laying-off-60-of-employees-1001543241))
- 2026-04-29 · News: The bottleneck was never the model. 🔎 (1 source: [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ai21_yet-another-ai-newsletter-spring-2026-activity-7455261020178038785-wxuP))
- 2026-03-27 · News: The $3 Billion Stealth Giant: AI21 Labs & Nvidia (2 sources: [doi.org](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19257290), [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ai21_ai21-labs-is-1-on-the-hugging-face-browsecomp-plus-activity-7452715852543537152-cTWz))
- 2026-01-01 · Expansion: AI21 Labs introduced Jamba2, a memory-efficient open source model family for enterprise reliability and steerability (4 sources: [en.globes.co.il](https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-nebius-in-talks-to-acquire-ai21labs-report-1001539693), [calcalistech.com](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rjswz37eze), [en.globes.co.il](https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-after-raising-700m-ai21-labs-looks-for-exit-1001530580))

## Working on now

- AI21’s clearest current direction is enterprise AI-agent optimization around Maestro, following a May 2026 restructuring that reportedly cut headcount from about 180 to about 70 and ended standalone model sales as a primary business.
- Its latest disclosed work is “Lab-as-a-Service”: Forward-Deployed Researchers use AI21’s Harness and Model training platform to post-train open models on customers’ data, tools and policies in weeks rather than quarters.
- Recent production-oriented examples include post-training NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL for Gong, Deel and Alice; AI21 reports specialized results on CRM editing, payroll QA and agent security.
- AI21 also launched the open-source Jamba2 family (3B and Mini) for enterprise reliability, long-context grounding and local/on-device deployment; the launch page says it is available through AI21 Studio and Hugging Face.
- The strategic market appears global enterprise deployment rather than a country-specific consumer product: reported commercial customers include Nebius and Wix, while Deel’s use case spans payroll questions across 150+ countries.

From: [Partnering with NVIDIA, Gong, Deel and Alice to Post-Train Nemotron 3.5 Super](https://www.ai21.com/blog/ai21-post-trains-nvidia-nemotron-35-super-vl/), [Post-Training Nemotron to Beat GPT-6.1 on Attack Resilience](https://www.ai21.com/blog/ai21-alice-case-study/), [Jamba2: Open Source LLMs for Enterprise Reliability](https://www.ai21.com/blog/introducing-jamba2/), [AI21 cuts more than 60% of its workforce in major strategic overhaul | Ctech](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rjwumhukfx)

## Summary

AI21 Labs is an Israeli company that specializes in artificial intelligence systems designed to understand and generate natural language [1]. Founded in 2017 by Amnon Shashua, Yoav Shoham, and Ori Goshen, the company has pivoted from its original consumer-facing writing assistant, Wordtune, to focus exclusively on enterprise AI optimization [2][3]. As of May 2026, AI21 Labs has undergone a strategic restructuring, reducing its staff to focus on its Maestro technology, an AI agent orchestration system that improves the accuracy and performance of AI agents [2]. The company has ceased independent development of language models and now operates through partnerships and contracts with clients like Wix and Nevius [2]. Key investors include Nvidia, Google, Intel Capital, Walden Catalyst, and Pitango [4][5]. Competitors in the broader generative AI space include OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google [6][3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI21_Labs "AI21 Labs"
[2]: https://www.calcalist.co.il/calcalistech/article/byojjbojgx "חברת ה-AI של אמנון שעשוע מפטרת 110 עובדים - יותר מ-60% מכוח האדם  | כלכליסט"
[3]: https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rkbh00xnzl "Nvidia in advanced talks to acquire AI21 in $2-3 billion deal focused on talent | Ctech"
[4]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-google-back-ai21-labs-140222256.html "Nvidia And Google Back AI21 Labs In $300M Series D To Build Proprietary LLMs, Challenging OpenAI And Anthropic In Enterprise AI"
[5]: https://www.ai21.com/blog/series-c-funding/ "AI21 Labs Announces Series C Funding Round at $1.4 Billion Valuation | AI21"
[6]: https://research.contrary.com/report/ai21-labs "Report: AI21 Labs Business Breakdown & Founding Story | Contrary Research"
[7]: https://www.heliad.com/highlights/heliad-invests-in-artificial-intelligence-business-ai21-labs "Heliad invests in artificial intelligence business AI21 Labs | HELIAD Hightlights"
[8]: https://www.ai21.com/blog/ai21-completes-208-million-oversubscribed-series-c-round/ "AI21 Completes $208 Million Oversubscribed Series C Round | AI21"

## Sources

- [AI21 Labs's website](https://ai21.com)
- [Company record, via Exa](https://www.ai21.com/)
- [Partnering with NVIDIA, Gong, Deel and Alice to Post-Train Nemotron 3.5 Super](https://www.ai21.com/blog/ai21-post-trains-nvidia-nemotron-35-super-vl/)
- [Post-Training Nemotron to Beat GPT-6.1 on Attack Resilience](https://www.ai21.com/blog/ai21-alice-case-study/)
- [Jamba2: Open Source LLMs for Enterprise Reliability](https://www.ai21.com/blog/introducing-jamba2/)
- [AI21 cuts more than 60% of its workforce in major strategic overhaul | Ctech](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rjwumhukfx)
- [About](https://www.ai21.com/about/)
- [ai21 labs](https://linkedin.com/company/ai21)