Israeli AI company founded by Amnon Shashua will reduce workforce from about 180 to 70 employees, most of them in Israel, while ending standalone model sales and focusing resources on its Maestro platform
AI21, the Israeli artificial intelligence company founded by Mobileye founder Prof. Amnon Shashua, told employees Monday it is carrying out a major organizational overhaul that will cut its workforce from about 180 employees to roughly 70.
Most of the employees being laid off are based in Israel.
The company said the restructuring will focus its resources on AI agent optimization technology, the core of its flagship Maestro platform. Negotiations for the acquisition of AI21 by Nebius have ended, but the two companies signed a business cooperation agreement.
AI21 said the move comes as many organizations struggle to deploy AI agents and adapt them to their operational needs after the initial development stage. The company said it will now concentrate on developing agent optimization solutions based on Maestro, while ending standalone sales of its language models.
Those models remain a significant foundation for the company’s artificial intelligence expertise, AI21 said, but they are not a sufficient source of revenue on their own.
At the same time, AI21 said it signed contracts worth tens of millions of dollars with major international customers that will deploy Maestro, including Nebius, to develop and operate AI agent optimization solutions. The company also signed partnership agreements with several companies, including Wix, that will build activity on the Maestro platform.
Over the past two years, AI21 has operated along two main tracks: developing the Jamba family of language models, designed to help organizations work efficiently with large amounts of information, and developing Maestro, intended to address one of the main barriers to large-scale AI adoption — the ability to run reliable, accurate and efficient AI agents in real working environments.
AI21 says one of the main problems companies face in implementing AI is balancing quality, cost and response time while maintaining reliability. Improving the performance of a research agent, for example, requires smart selection of models, tools, execution strategies and control methods. But the number of possible combinations is too large and complex for manual trial and error.
Maestro is designed to bridge that gap by learning to predict the cost and likelihood of success of each possible configuration, then running simulations to find the optimal combination of models and tools for the most accurate results while preserving operational efficiency. The goal is to turn agent optimization from a manual trial-and-error process into an automated, dynamic and data-based engineering process.
AI21 was founded in 2017 by Shashua, Yoav Shoham and Ori Goshen, who serves as its CEO. Shoham is a world-renowned AI professor who previously led Stanford University’s AI lab.
“The developments in the AI field required us to reexamine the company’s operations from end to end,” AI21 said. “With great regret, we are parting from a group of excellent employees who made significant contributions to the company’s key milestones. We are committed to supporting them during this period with sensitivity and responsibility, and to doing everything we can to help them transition to their next stage.”
The company said the restructuring and its focus on AI agent optimization — “a central problem for organizations around the world” — would allow AI21 to move onto an accelerated growth path.