AI21 Labs vs StepFun

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

AI21 Labs has raised more in total funding at $636M, compared to StepFun's $200M — a gap of $436M. Combined, the two companies have completed 9 known funding rounds.

AI21 Labs holds the higher Awaira Score at 72/100, compared to StepFun's 58/100. The Awaira Score is a composite metric factoring in valuation, funding, stage, team size, and market presence — a 14-point gap that reflects meaningful differences in scale or traction.

AI21 Labs was founded by Yoav Shoham in 2017. StepFun was founded by Jiang Daxin in 2023. 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. StepFun: StepFun develops multimodal foundation models for Chinese and English language applications, producing the Step series of large language and vision-language models that target enterprise deployment through API and private cloud licensing. The Beijing company was founded by Jiang Daxin, a former senior executive at Baidu, bringing search and large-scale AI infrastructure experience to foundation model development in the rapidly competitive Chinese LLM startup market.\n\nThe company raised approximately $200 million in early funding from Chinese venture capital firms including Hillhouse Capital and other technology-focused investors backing the wave of Chinese foundation model startups that emerged following the launch of ChatGPT. StepFun models are positioned for enterprise customers in finance, legal, and customer service sectors requiring high-quality Chinese language reasoning and instruction following capabilities.\n\nStepFun competes in a crowded Chinese foundation model market alongside Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Zhipu AI, and Baichuan, as well as the AI divisions of Alibaba, Baidu, and ByteDance that have substantially greater compute resources and distribution. The Chinese foundation model market has seen aggressive fundraising and model release activity as the government signals support for domestic AI capability development. Differentiation among Chinese LLM startups is increasingly difficult as model benchmark performance converges, shifting competition toward vertical domain adaptation, inference cost, and enterprise integration services.

AI21 Labs was founded first in 2017, giving it 6 years of additional market experience. StepFun was founded later in 2023. 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 StepFun 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 StepFun 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.