AI21 Labs

AI21 Labs is one of the original independent foundation-model labs, founded in Tel Aviv in 2017 and best known in 2026 for the Jamba family — open-weight hybrid Mamba/Transformer LLMs with industry-leading effective context windows up to 256K tokens that punch above their weight on long-document tasks while running cheaper than equivalent pure-transformer models. Jamba 1.5 Mini and Jamba 1.5 Large are available through AI21 Studio, AWS Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry, Google Vertex, and Snowflake Cortex, and the weights are downloadable for self-hosting under the Jamba Open Model License. Beyond raw models, AI21 ships Maestro, a planning-and-orchestration runtime that breaks complex enterprise tasks into auditable steps with tool use, retrieval, and guardrails — sold mainly to financial-services, public-sector, and regulated industries that want a single accountable vendor. AI21 Studio offers a free tier with $10 trial credit and pay-per-token pricing thereafter (Jamba 1.5 Mini at $0.20 in / $0.40 out per 1M tokens, Jamba 1.5 Large at roughly $2 in / $8 out per 1M tokens). Enterprise deals add VPC deployment, fine-tuning, dedicated capacity, and SOC 2 / HIPAA / GDPR compliance.