AI21 Labs vs BorealisAI

AI21 Labs has a disclosed valuation of $1.4B, while BorealisAI's valuation is not publicly available, making a direct size comparison difficult. AI21 Labs employs 250 people.

AI21 Labs has raised $636M in disclosed funding across 9 known rounds. BorealisAI's funding history is not publicly available.

AI21 Labs holds the higher Awaira Score at 72/100, compared to BorealisAI's 55/100. The Awaira Score is a composite metric factoring in valuation, funding, stage, team size, and market presence — a 17-point gap that reflects meaningful differences in scale or traction.

AI21 Labs was founded by Yoav Shoham in 2017. BorealisAI was founded by Russ Salakhutdinov in 2018. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

AI21 Labs: AI21 Labs is an Israeli foundation model company founded in 2017 that develops large language models and AI systems for enterprise applications. The company is best known for its Jurassic language model family, which powers various natural language processing tasks including text generation, summarization, and question-answering. AI21 Labs operates through both direct API access and integration with cloud platforms, serving customers across multiple industries. The company has positioned itself in the competitive foundation models landscape alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and other providers, distinguishing itself through a focus on instruction-following capabilities and multilingual support. AI21 Labs has secured $636 million in total funding and achieved a $1.4 billion valuation, reflecting investor confidence in its technology and market approach. The company operates primarily through its cloud-based AI platform, offering researchers and developers access to its models. It has demonstrated growth through partnerships and enterprise adoption, though facing intense competition in the rapidly consolidating foundation models sector. AI21 Labs remains in Series D funding stage, indicating it has not yet pursued initial public offering. The company employs researchers with backgrounds in academia and industry, maintaining focus on advancing core language model capabilities and exploring commercial applications across sectors including content generation, customer service, and information retrieval. AI21 Labs combines deep research in language models with enterprise-focused API infrastructure to compete against larger foundation model providers. BorealisAI: Borealis AI is the AI research laboratory of Royal Bank of Canada, conducting fundamental and applied machine learning research with a focus on financial AI applications including time series forecasting, anomaly detection, natural language processing for financial documents, and AI fairness in credit and fraud decision systems. The Toronto-based lab collaborates with academic institutions and publishes research while developing AI capabilities deployed across RBC banking and capital markets operations.\n\nFully funded by Royal Bank of Canada, one of Canada largest financial institutions, Borealis AI operates without external investment, accessing the capital resources and data infrastructure of a tier-one bank for its research programmes. The lab has published extensively in top machine learning venues and developed open-source tools for temporal point processes and probabilistic forecasting that have been adopted by the broader research community.\n\nBorealis AI competes for talent with AI research labs including Vector Institute, Mila, and commercial labs from Google DeepMind and Meta AI that recruit from the same Canadian academic AI talent pool. The RBC affiliation provides access to real financial data at scale that academic labs cannot access, enabling research on problems including financial time series prediction and credit decision fairness that require production-scale data. The lab serves as both a research institution and a talent pipeline for RBC internal AI engineering teams building AI features across the bank retail, wealth management, and capital markets business lines.

AI21 Labs was founded first in 2017, giving it 1 year of additional market experience. BorealisAI was founded later in 2018. In AI, even a year or two of head start can translate into significantly more training data, customer relationships, and institutional knowledge.

AI21 Labs has approximately 250 employees, while BorealisAI has approximately 100-500. A larger team often signals higher revenue or venture backing, but in AI, smaller teams are increasingly capable of building at scale.

Yes, AI21 Labs and BorealisAI are direct competitors — both operate in the Foundation Models space and likely target overlapping customer segments. This comparison is especially relevant for buyers evaluating both platforms.