AI Startup Roundup: Intel, Comcast Back OpenAI Rival AI21

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AI21 Labs

AI21 is an OpenAI rival and the startup behind the Jurassic large language model. AI21 has its own NLP-as-a-service platform, AI21 Studio, designed for commercial organizations to leverage AI tools.

It has been previously backed by Google and Nvidia.

Latest funding: $53 million, series C extension (bringing full round total to $336 million)

Investors: Intel Capital, Comcast Ventures, Ahren Innovation Capital

Earlier investors: Samsung Next, Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X and b2venture

Funding plans: The new funds will be put towards accelerating the development of the company’s Task-Specific Models, AI systems built around targeted natural language processing tasks.

Osium AI

French firm Osium AI is using AI technologies to improve materials science research and development. Traditional methods are often manual and rely on intuition. The startup is using AI to accelerate materials synthesis cycles and reduce waste during development phases.

Latest funding: $2.6 million, seed round

Investors: Y Combinator, Raise Phiture, Collaborative Fund, Kima Ventures, Singular

Angel investors: Julien Chaumond, co-founder and CTO of Hugging Face, Isaac Oates, founder and executive chair of Justworks, WayUp founder Liz Wessel

Funding plans: Expand its team and capitalize on interest from various industrial sectors

Artisan AI

Artisan AI develops human-like AI digital workers it calls artisans. Its tech would work out of the box and is designed to integrate with human teams across sales, marketing and design. Users can chat with their AI workers and ask them to do tasks, change settings, conduct research or even solicit advice.

Latest funding: $2.3 million, pre-seed round

Lead investors: Bayhouse Capital, Oliver Jung

Funding plans: Artisan is looking to expand its staff roster, with a focus on bringing in engineers and product-focused team members.