AI21 never closed its reported $300 million round as Nvidia weighs an acquisition
The Israeli startup’s much-publicized 2025 Series D was never finalized, leaving its 2023 round as its last completed raise as Nvidia holds acquisition talks.
For much of 2025, AI21 Labs was widely described as having pulled off one of Israel’s largest artificial-intelligence fundraisings: a $300 million Series D backed by Google and Nvidia. The round was cited as evidence that the company, one of the country’s few builders of a large-scale language model, had secured its place among the industry’s serious contenders.
It now turns out that the round was never completed. In fact, AI21’s last actual fundraising took place in November 2023, when the company extended its Series C to a total of $208 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion. The much-discussed Series D was never closed, never formally announced, and never reflected in the company’s capital structure.
The revelation comes as Nvidia is now in advanced talks to acquire AI21. Estimates suggest a potential deal value of $2-3 billion, above the company’s last known valuation but far below the sums commanded by the sector’s global leaders. If completed, the transaction would appear to be driven less by technology than by people.
AI21 currently employs around 200 people, down from the 260 it reported in 2023. A plan to recruit an additional 100 employees in 2024 never materialized. Nvidia’s interest is widely understood to center on the company’s workforce, highly trained AI researchers, many with advanced academic credentials, rather than on a breakout commercial product.
Such an outcome would mark a quiet retreat from AI21’s original ambition. Founded in 2017 by Professor Amnon Shashua, Professor Yoav Shoham, and Ori Goshen, the company was conceived as a flagship Israeli effort to compete at the frontier of artificial intelligence, years before the generative AI boom that reshaped the industry after 2022. Shoham and Goshen serve as co-CEOs, with Shashua as chairman.
Google and Nvidia first invested in AI21 during the 2023 round, which was later expanded during the war in Israel. Over the past two years, however, the company has struggled to keep pace with the accelerating advances of rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic. In April, AI21 halted development of Wordtune, its long-running consumer-facing product, narrowing its focus to enterprise customers where accuracy and reliability matter more than scale or experimentation.
Today, AI21’s business centers on specialized language models for corporate use. Its flagship product, Maestro, is designed to improve model accuracy by up to 50%, and the company has recently introduced a new reasoning model that it says is faster and more memory-efficient than competing systems. Even so, estimates suggest annual revenue of roughly $50 million, a figure that has not meaningfully changed since 2023.
For Nvidia, an acquisition of AI21 would be small relative to its resources, given its roughly $60 billion cash position, but strategically consistent with CEO Jensen Huang’s expansion in Israel. It would also echo the structure of Nvidia’s recent local deals, which have emphasized rapid talent accumulation. Since 2023, the company has acquired Deci and Run:ai for a combined $1 billion, following its landmark $7 billion purchase of Mellanox.
