AI21 Labs: Being in Amazon's Bedrock without any investment from Amazon

The article below was published in December 2023, when AI21 Labs was still trying to compete across consumer writing tools, proprietary language models and enterprise APIs. The company is now much smaller and much more focused.

In May 2026, Calcalist reported that AI21 was cutting about 110 of its roughly 180 employees, leaving around 70. The restructuring put Maestro–AI21’s system for optimizing production AI agents–at the center of the business. The same report said the company would stop selling language models as a standalone business and pursue large enterprise contracts and partnerships instead.

That does not mean every earlier product disappeared. AI21 released Jamba2 in January 2026 under Apache 2.0, and the models remained available through AI21 Studio and Hugging Face when this update was checked. Wordtune’s public site also remained online, although reporting says active development ended in April 2025. Jurassic-2, however, belongs to the company’s earlier product era and is no longer the model family AI21 markets to new customers.

Acquisition stories also need care. AI21 denied reports of acquisition negotiations with NVIDIA in January 2026. Later talks with Nebius ended without a sale; the companies signed a commercial partnership instead. AI21 also cited enterprise work with Wix.

Finally, the $1.4 billion valuation comes from AI21’s November 2023 Series C. No later financing round has publicly established a new valuation, so it should be read as historical–not as a current 2026 figure.

AI21 Labs was the first independent startup to surpass OpenAI’s GPT-3. In September 2021, their Jurassic-1, featuring 178 billion parameters, ignited the 2021 race for ever-larger language models. In the same year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) published a case study highlighting how AI21 Labs optimized their language model using Amazon's EC2 P4d Instances and the PyTorch toolkit.

Strangely enough, AI21 Labs, despite its integration into the AWS ecosystem, hasn’t received investment from Amazon, which contrasts with Amazon's investments in Cohere and Anthropic. This is intriguing given AI21 Labs’ solutions are employed by Amazon's Bedrock.

Is there a generous investment from Amazon coming? Let’s learn more about the startup, which recently joined the GenAI Unicorn Family with a $1.4 billion valuation and has, so far, thrived without Amazon's financial backing.

AI21 Labs was co-founded in 2017 by Prof. Yoav Shoham (Professor Emeritus at Stanford), Ori Goshen (Founder, CrowdX), and Prof. Amnon Shashua (Founder, Mobileye). "AI21 Labs was founded to change and fundamentally improve how people read and write. Pushing the frontier of language-based AI requires more than just pattern recognition offered by current deep language models," CEO Shoham told VentureBeat. 

Shoham met Goshen in an Israeli non-profit project that democratizes programming skills. They found each other like-minded and decided to start AI21 Labs ("AI for the 21st century") to build AI systems "with an unprecedented capacity to understand and generate natural language."

Amnon Shashua became the Chairman, while Ori Goshen and Yoav Shoham were appointed as Co-CEOs.

After being in stealth mode for about three years, in October 2020 the team launched its first product, Wordtune, an AI-powered writing tool that helps refine and enhance text for clarity, tone, and style in real-time.

As per Goshen, what inspired them to develop a writing productivity tool as a use case is that "The way we write hasn't drastically changed since Microsoft Word in 1980, and the way we read hasn't changed since the printing press in 1440. We believe both can be made AI-first experiences, with the machine becoming a true writing and reading partner."

The lab was founded to become the next big disruptor in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) space to give machines the human-like ability to understand and generate text. Far from seeing machines as a replacement for humans' skills with written symbols that represent our understanding of the world, AI21 Labs views technology as a revolutionary tool.

Funnily enough, in ancient times (back in June 2022), when OpenAI had not yet announced building a superintelligence, they collaborated with Cohere and AI21 Labs to develop a set of Best Practices for Deploying Language Models. The guidelines were phrased in very grounded language: 'The future of human-machine interaction is full of possibility and promise, but any powerful technology needs careful deployment.’ For example, in the ‘Thoughtfully collaborate with stakeholders’ section, the document suggests building teams with diverse backgrounds, Publicly disclosing lessons learned regarding LLM safety and misuse, and treating all labor in the language model supply chain with respect.

Very good points, right?

Recently, Ori Goshen talked about how people were hyped and scared about generative AI. But he's saying, "There has been a lot of hype – and fear – surrounding generative AI recently, with new exciting tools emerging daily and consumer demand through the roof. The initial fear around AI is starting to wane as the world realizes the benefits. McKinsey recently released a report estimating that AI will boost the world economy by trillions each year."

The notable rounds:

In June 2022, the AI21 lab spiced things up with an 'Ask Ruth Bader Ginsburg' bot. Ruth Bader Ginsburg served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until she died in 2020. The bot had been fed a lot of her data: legal opinions, interviews, speeches. But a former law clerk of Ginsburg, Paul Schiff Berman, wasn't too impressed. He told The Washington Post the bot's responses didn't quite cut it.

Today, the company caters to enterprise-level customers. Recently, the team announced Contextual Answers, a plug-and-play engine for businesses to make finding info quicker and more accurate using generative AI. You ask a question about your company's info, and the tool gives you the answers.How Does AI21 Labs’ Technology Work?

AI21 Labs has been focusing on addressing the challenges of text ambiguity in NLP. Here's a summary of their approach and innovations:

Based on that research and approach, they first developed a language model called HAIM. HAIM means “Halfway Acceptable Interpolating Machine”. The model offered such a name itself. First, it was: J1-Jumbo (178B parameters) and J1-Large (7B parameters). The "Jurassic-1: Technical Details and Evaluation" paper explains that these models are built on the Transformer architecture, with enhancements for efficiency and a larger vocabulary size compared to GPT-3. The paper evaluates Jurassic-1's performance in terms of perplexity, zero-shot, and few-shot learning. It also addresses the challenges of training large-scale models and the inherent biases in language models, emphasizing the need for ongoing research in these areas.

Jurassic-1 was succeeded by Jurassic-2 in March 2023, alongside task-specific APIs.t launch, Jurassic-2 improved quality, zero-shot instruction following, latency, and multilingual support over Jurassic-1. The family included Large, Grande, and Jumbo variants. These details describe the 2023 release, not AI21’s current commercial offering.

A significant advancement by AI21 Labs is their MRKL system – a modular, neuro-symbolic architecture that combines large language models, external knowledge sources, and discrete reasoning.How does Wordtune work: It suggests alternative ways to write what one has typed. The interface is similar to translation productivity tools (a.k.a. CAT tools). It's like this: hover your cursor over a word, and a menu of synonyms pops up. Highlight a sentence, and you're given a selection of paraphrased options, categorized into casual (marked by a sneaker) or formal (with a briefcase).

Earlier this year, AI21 Labs conducted a social experiment called "Human or Not". More than 2 million people chatted with each other over 15 million times on their website. Here's the twist – at the end of each chat, they had to guess if the other person was a human or a computer. Nearly a third of them got it wrong.The creative product lead at AI21 Labs at the time of the experiment, Amos Meron, said they did this experiment to show people, researchers, and policymakers what AI was up to in early 2023. It wasn't just about AI being a handy tool; they wanted everyone to see AI as new members in the online world. You know, at a time when everyone's trying to figure out how AI should fit into our lives. 

The experiment was a sneak peek into the future, and AI21 Labs wanted everyone to get a good look.

Also worth checking the paper ‘Human or Not? A Gamified Approach to the Turing Test’.

AI21’s primary commercial focus is Maestro, an enterprise system that plans, executes, and validates multi-step AI-agent workflows. The company also continues to expose Jamba-related models and AI21 Studio services through public product pages.

AI21 released Jamba2 in January 2026, and the models remained available through AI21 Studio and Hugging Face when this article was checked. However, May 2026 reporting said the company had stopped further Jamba development as it concentrated resources on Maestro. Availability and active roadmap investment are not the same thing.

Wordtune’s public website still links to the app. Calcalist reported that AI21 discontinued active development in April 2025, so it is safer to describe Wordtune as maintained but no longer a strategic growth product – not definitively shut down.

No acquisition was announced. In January 2026, AI21 denied that it had held acquisition negotiations with NVIDIA, while acknowledging broader discussions with NVIDIA and other potential partners or investors.

The $1.4 billion valuation comes from AI21’s November 2023 Series C. AI21 is private, and no newer confirmed financing round has established a current valuation. The 2023 number should therefore be presented as historical.

Bonus: All important links about the founders and CEO

Prof. Yoav Shoham 

Ori Goshen

Prof. Amnon Shashua

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Previously in Unicorn Chronicles: