AI21 accelerates business growth with integrated data built with Rivery

As one of the leading and fastest-growing LLM Foundation Models and AI Systems provider companies globally, the team relies on Rivery to scale and enable data-driven decisions.

Key results:

• Through Rivery, AI21 saves the equivalent of 0.5 full-time data engineers.
• A simple set-up of new data source integrations allows AI21 to scale at the same pace as the business while keeping the data engineering team lean.
• Easy maintenance of 15+ data integrations to ensure data-driven operations for the Marketing, Sales, Finance, Product, and Operation teams. 

AI21 Labs (AI21) is a leader in generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs), with the mission to empower businesses with state-of-the-art LLMs and AI applications. Founded in 2017, AI21 has seen massive growth and raised $336 million, with the most recent Series C round closing at $208 million in November 2023. It was among the first companies to bring generative AI to the masses and offers enterprise solutions and consumer applications. 

With the developer platform AI21 Studio, businesses can build their own generative AI-driven applications and services with the advanced family of language models, Jurassic-2 and Jamba. AI21’s consumer product, Wordtune, is the first AI-based reading and writing assistant to understand context and meaning, enabling millions of users to refine and generate or read and summarize text within seconds.

The challenge: keeping up with rapid growth

In 2020, AI21 launched Wordtune, its first B2C product. With massive growth around usage leading to today’s more than 10 million users, product and marketing performance analytics were both critical to maintaining that usage growth pace. 

At first, data analytics was mostly conducted within the specific tools for product event analytics and marketing Ad management of the respective Ad channels, and with little support from data engineers. Shortly after, the team realized that the setup could no longer sustain the required analytics operation to satisfy the business requirements. 

This was true for both the speed of access to insights, the depth of the insights requiring data across systems, and the maintenance headaches that evolved with custom ad-hoc solutions that emerged over time. 

Very quickly, our ad-hoc data pipelines were transitioned from one dev to another and it was challenging to maintain. We realized we need a robust way to manage this data operation, said Shuki Cohen, Director of Data at AI21.

The solution: A managed platform for easy scalability

As a customer since 2022, AI21 values Rivery because of its simplicity and ability to scale with the company. With Rivery, AI21 can easily set up and maintain new data source integrations as the business grows, without investing in additional resources.  

And, the growth has been amazing: from the end of 2022 to the beginning of 2024, AI21 ingested and transformed from more than 15 different data sources, for an average of an additional data source per month. The ability to add integrations quickly and efficiently allows AI21 to use the data as soon as it is available in the source, which is crucial in driving pivotal business decisions.

Without Rivery, creating and maintaining all these different connectors would require an extensive set-up, says Irit Gurevich, Data Engineering and BI Team Lead at AI21.
With Rivery, accessing crucial data is made seamless. Thus, we can fully concentrate on the value that the data brings and avoid bottlenecks in data delivery.

Through Rivery, AI21 integrates internal data like product information with external data like payment and marketing data. The data pipelines are automated through Rivery into Google BigQuery, providing a centralized view of the entire business.

We looked at different vendors that were focused on specific data sources like marketing or customer data but we wanted a platform that would meet our data engineering standards across a variety of sources and would scale with us as we grow, says Shuki Cohen, Director of Data at AI21.
Rivery’s ease around data pipelines setup and team’s responsiveness to data engineers’ needs, along with the cost-effectiveness and their pay-as-you-go model made it easy for us.

The results: a data integration foundation for faster decision-making

With Rivery reducing the integration time for a new data source to a day and a half, it has become the default integration platform for new data sources requested by the business.

If we were to build those ourselves we would need to invest in building scalable ETL infrastructure which would have been a few weeks for a senior data engineer just in the initial build and then additional time per source and for on-going maintenance, said Irit Gurevich, Data Engineering and BI Team Lead at AI21.

The data teams can remain lean while supporting two different product lines for both consumers and businesses managed in two different data warehouses. 

Ultimately, Rivery-powered analytics provide value across the company: 

• Marketing analyzes the key KPIs across channels to improve campaign effectiveness and efficiency.
• Customer success teams use chat analytics to elevate consumer experiences.
• C-level executives make strategic decisions on specific products and the further development of AI21 based on financial data and other metrics from across the business.