Amnon Shashua’s latest artificial intelligence venture is on its way to reaching unicorn status. Calcalist has learned that U.S. venture capital firm Lightspeed is leading a funding round worth hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of more than $1 billion for AAI — pronounced “Double AI” — a company that has until now operated under the radar.
Double AI functions primarily as a group of researchers publishing academic papers in one of the most ambitious areas of the field: so-called “thinking models” or superintelligence, in contrast with the training and inference models that most companies focus on today.
The startup was founded by Shashua, who is best known as the CEO of Mobileye, the autonomous vehicle company acquired by Intel, together with Prof. Shai Shalev-Shwartz, Mobileye’s chief technology officer. Shalev-Shwartz also co-founded the robotics startup Mentee with Shashua. Other co-founders of Double AI include several of Shashua’s former doctoral students: Prof. Yoav Levine, Prof. Or Sharir, Dr. Noam Wies and Dr. Gal Benyamini. The group brings together leading researchers from computer science, mathematics, physics and biology.
As with Shashua’s other ventures, the goal is ambitious: to build groundbreaking AI technology that can fuel scientific discoveries and transform how humanity addresses its toughest problems. As he put it in a recent post: “Our mission is simple: to usher in a new era of discovery by developing the code of superintelligence.”
Double AI was established at the end of 2023 and has kept a low profile, aside from releasing research papers on social networks. Market sources say it has already raised tens of millions of dollars, led by Michael Dell’s venture capital fund along with Israeli firms Pitango and BRM, which are also expected to participate in the current round. The company employs only a small number of staff outside its research team, but its website lists open positions in engineering and development. Double AI declined to comment.
This is not Shashua’s first attempt to put Israel on the map in large language model (LLM) development, considered the “holy grail” of AI research, rather than the narrower application layer where most Israeli companies operate. In 2017 he co-founded AI21 with Prof. Yoav Shoham and Ori Goshen. That company became a unicorn several years ago but has struggled to make a breakthrough since the late-2022 AI boom. AI21 has raised more than $300 million to date and is currently in talks to raise another $300 million from investors including Nvidia and Google, though the round has not yet closed.
In August, TIME magazine named Shashua one of the 100 most influential people in AI, alongside OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Double AI was cited as one reason for his inclusion, along with Mentee and Mobileye, whose autonomous driving systems are set to be integrated into Uber and Lyft’s driverless taxis in 2026. Mobileye is currently traded on Wall Street with a market capitalization of $11.5 billion, 80 percent of which is still owned by Intel.
Not all of Shashua’s ventures have flourished. Orcam, which developed smart glasses for the visually impaired, laid off much of its staff in the past year. His digital bank, One Zero, which operates in Israel, has so far failed to attract enough customers.