A121 Labs Announces a $155M Funding Round, Unicorn Valuation, and Updates to Wordtune App

The new valuation follows rapid market growth and the expansion of AI21's product portfolio

AI21 Labs is the latest generative AI provider to secure unicorn status from investors. It has secured $155 million in Series C funding, bringing its total capital raised to $283 million. The latest funding also sets a new valuation of $1.4 billion.

Key investors include Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, Samsung, and others, with participation from Google and NVIDIA. Jensen Huang, CEO and founder of NVIDIA commented about the company:

Generative AI is driving a new era of computing across every industry. The innovative work by the AI21 Labs team will help enterprises accelerate productivity and efficiency with generative AI-based systems that are accurate, trustworthy, and reliable.

While AI21 has developed one of the most prominent foundation models and is partnered with both AWS and Google Cloud for its Jurassic 2 large language model (LLM), it is best known for the Wordtune application. Wordtune is an AI assistant for reading, writing, summarization, and related tasks. It just received a significant upgrade last week and demonstrates how AI21 has optionality beyond that of some other LLM providers.

Wordtune Tune-Up

Wordtune evolved from a browser extension into an iOS app and Google Docs integration, initially targeting individual users but increasingly focusing on enterprise users. Carrefour, eBay, Monday.com, and Ubisoft are all AI21 Wordtune customers.

AI21 says it already has tens of millions of Wordtune users and expects to add more with the new enterprise features. The company also recently announced SOC-2 compliance, which will ease the path to enterprise adoption.

In addition, the grammar checking and summarization features were previously separated, and the update merges those along with new writing capabilities and the option to connect to a knowledge base search. According to Voicebot.ai:

For instance, making document templates helps with designing marketing content and presentations while helping fill open jobs. The question-answering feature can solicit any linked company library to explain things to employees, with the citations ensuring the AI isn’t hallucinating. Other features have been announced, though not released yet, including proactive writing suggestions, live outlines for “producing and editing full articles based on multiple key points,” and long-form editing, a feature that will enable Wordtune to revise large documents all at once.

At one point, Wordtune looked like a Grammarly competitor. The merging of summarization, text generation, and question-answering extends that footprint to include some features you might expect from ChatGPT Enterprise, Jasper AI, or Claude 2. You should think of Wordtune as growing into a comprehensive solution for professionals who work with and generate text.

The LLM Wars

There are a lot of LLMs on the market. The question for anyone who is not OpenAI is how do you differentiate from the pack. While OpenAI stumbled into the application world with ChatGPT, AI21 deliberately set out to offer both applications and foundation model APIs.

Wordtune is a very valuable asset for AI21, aside from any revenue it generates. The writing assistant provides AI21 with more data and market feedback on its solutions than most competitors can access. Tens of millions of users may also mean AI21 offers the LLM with the second or third-largest user base. The shift into enterprise use cases may open up even more enterprise opportunities.

While we are seeing many high-valuation funding rounds for LLM providers, the justification for those valuations is often unclear. AI21’s mix of foundation model and end-user application success, makes the new $1.4 billion valuation seem logical, especially if the new funding enables the company to accelerate further Wordtune and Juarassic adoption.