NEWSRAEL: PM Netanyahu has been touting Israel as the next "AI center", and since his meeting with Elon Musk and other AI giants, you can see the effect it has had on Israel's startup world.

The number of Israeli generative AI startups has increased by over twofold within the space of five months, growing from 67 to 144 companies, according to the Tel Aviv-based seed and pre-seed venture firm Remagine Ventures.

In its periodical landscape of the Israeli Gen AI industry, the venture firm noted that the local industry had raised $2.3 billion by September 21. The report demonstrated that Israeli companies are operating in cross-industry generative applications such as text, code, visual media and video generations, in specific verticals such as gaming and entertainment, education, commerce, health and life sciences.

Among the startups highlighted in the landscape were language model startup AI21 Labs that completed a Series C funding round of $155 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion earlier this month – the second-largest fundraise by an Israeli company in 2023, a year marked by a global decrease in startup funding.

Another company mentioned in the landscape was unicorn Lightricks. The visual media generation giant that operates out of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem recently spoke to ISRAEL21c on how it is adapting to a gen AI world and the ways in which it is effecting change.

The only startup featured in the gen AI food industry, meanwhile, was Tastewise – featured by ISRAEL21c earlier this year – which has created TasteGPT, an AI-powered market intelligence platform aimed at helping food and beverage brands decide what their customers will like by shortening research time and answering business-critical questions.

“So much has happened in the generative AI space globally, and in Israel, since we published the previous version of the Israeli generative AI landscape in April 2023,” Reimagine Ventures concluded. “The technology is advancing at a breathtaking pace.”