Shashua's artificial expert intelligence co AA-I raises funds

Exclusive: Investors in Amnon's Shashua's latest AI startup include Dell Technologies Capital, the Barkat brothers BRM Capital and Pitango First.

Exclusive: The new startup founded by Mobileye Global Inc (Nasdaq: MBLY) founder Prof. Amnon Shashua AA-I Technologies has raised $20-30 million in a seed financing round, sources have told "Globes." The funds will help the company hire experienced staff with Ph.ds and expertise in AI. The financing round was led by billionaire Michael Dell's Dell Technologies Capital (DTC), the Barkat brothers BRM Capital and the Pitango First venture capital fund.

Shashua has found investors that he knows from his other companies including BRM's Eli Barkat, who invested in Mobileye and Eyal Niv from Pitango, who was the first investor in AI21 Labs - Shashua's more established AI startup.

A new investor participating in this financing round is Yair Snir, who manages DTC's investments in Israel. The three investors in this financing round declined to comment.

The seed financing round was closed several months ago, at the same time as AI21 Labs raised $300 million, as was reported by "Business Insider" at the start of the month.

What is AA-I developing?

AA-I was registered in Jerusalem in August 2023 and has since moved to Ramat Gan, where it has operated in stealth with several dozen employees, mainly AI engineers with Ph.Ds in the field.

After "Globes" first revealed the existence of the startup last September, Shashua unveiled the company through a tweet in December and wrote that one of its aims is to develop reasoning models that will perform processes and make decisions like human experts.

Shashua is critical of entrepreneurs and scientists who seek to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) or superintelligence, and more general models that can make human-like decisions, and instead presents models based on simpler principles, which he calls AEI - "Artificial Expert Intelligence".

The new models, the programming for which was developed by Shashua and his team - former employees of companies such as AI21 and Mentee Robotics - allow AI systems to make accurate and correct decisions while working on solving a problem or completing a task. This is an important element in transforming AI into a kind of digital agent, which will not only be satisfied with providing answers to questions, but will also perform tasks and, above all, imitate the way of thinking of a human expert - such as a software developer, doctor or researcher.

Shashua's inference models fit well with the trend of intelligent agents. They have recently been increasingly integrated into companies such as Salesforce, Microsoft and ServiceNow. Nvidia has also entered the field by launching the "Nemotron" model - an open inference model based on Llama, Meta's AI model, and distributed for free as a complementary product to Nvidia customers.

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Hired a team of experts for the company

In the past, Shashua wanted to found a company that would harness AI to produce a "superscientist" through software - that is, an intelligent agent that could solve sophisticated scientific problems, but over time, the initiative at the company expanded to cover all areas of inference, even to business areas that are devoid of scientific pretensions - such as software code development. Shashua, however, is confident that the AEI in his development is more accurate and better at drawing conclusions in different areas of expertise.

He argues that, unlike more general models, those built by AA-I "emulate the rigor of the scientific method, apply a decomposition approach to small problems, and prioritize structured, empirical validation to ensure greater accuracy."

"Unlike existing models that excel during training but falter in real-time learning. "Expert systems maintain adaptability during inference by breaking down complex problems into smaller problems and ensuring accuracy at every stage," Shashua wrote.

Shashua says AEI represents a significant leap forward in the development of advanced AI systems. Due to AEI's thinking structure, it is able to deal with changing problems while maintaining a high level of accuracy, which makes its potential use particularly broad.

In a scientific article he wrote and published, Shashua also shared information about some of the company's first employees: his co-founder of Mentee Robotics, Prof. Shai Shaled Swartz, and Shashua's former students, including Dr. Yoav Levin - a former AI scientist at Shashua's AI21, who is completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University; Dr. Or Sharir, also a former AI21 scientist, who is completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech; and Dr. Noam Weiss, an algorithmist recruited from Shashua's Orcam. Other experts include Ido Ben-Shushan, who until recently had a doctorate in mathematics; Tomer Nissenbaum and Shir Granot Peled, former head of engineering at the blockchain company Starkware.

Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on May 18, 2025.

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