AI21 Labs

AI21 Labs was founded in 2017 in Tel Aviv by Yoav Shoham (Stanford AI professor emeritus, ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award), Amnon Shashua (Mobileye CEO, Hebrew University professor), and Ori Goshen. Raised ~$283M at a $1.4B valuation. NVIDIA was in advanced acquisition talks ($2–3B) as of late 2025.

AI21 trained the Jurassic series (2021, 178B dense) and then introduced the Jamba architecture (2024) — the first production-grade SSM-Transformer-MoE hybrid combining Mamba state-space layers with Transformer attention and mixture-of-experts routing. Jamba 1.7 Large (398B total / 94B active, 256K context) is the current flagship. The hybrid architecture achieves 2.5x faster inference than equivalent dense Transformers while fitting on a single 80GB GPU.