Mistral AI, the Paris-based startup founded by alumni from Meta and Google’s DeepMind, has raised $640 million in a Series B funding round. General Catalyst led the investment, which included $503 million in equity and $142 million in debt. This round brings the company’s valuation to $6 billion, just one year after its founding. Contributions from several new and existing investors signal strong confidence in Mistral’s pursuit of cutting-edge AI technology.
Initially, Mistral entered the generative AI race with Europe’s largest-ever seed round of $113 million. Now, it is gearing up to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic in the global AI arena. The startup has already released pre-trained and fine-tuned models under open-source licenses, including Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B, and Mistral 8x22B. Mistral’s focus on open-source models and multilingual support sets it apart in the AI field.
Significant Investor Confidence
The Series B round attracted a diverse array of investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, NVIDIA, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, and Salesforce Ventures. The company’s progress in releasing foundational models over the past 18 months has been a key factor in attracting such significant investment. With this influx of capital, Mistral AI’s total funding now exceeds $1 billion.
Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral AI, expressed his delight in the investors’ renewed confidence and support for the company’s expansion. The funding ensures Mistral AI’s continued independence and positions the startup to push the boundaries of AI technology.
Pushing the Frontier of AI
Mistral AI is a relatively new entrant in the AI market, founded in April 2023. Despite its youth, the company is known for its powerful multilingual AI. Its latest model, Mistral Large, is fluent in five languages: French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian. Mistral Large trails OpenAI’s GPT-4 in reasoning benchmarks by only 10%, and the company also provides two other models, Small and Medium, for different workloads.
In February, Mistral partnered with Microsoft to access Azure’s supercomputing cloud architecture for training and deploying its AI models. Microsoft also invested €15 million ($16.3 million) into the company, which will convert into equity during this funding round.
Future Plans and Models
Mistral AI’s most advanced models, such as Mistral Large, are proprietary and designed to be repackaged as API-first products. Companies can use Mistral Large through an API, paying based on usage. The company also offers a free chat assistant called Le Chat and has distribution partnerships with cloud providers like Microsoft Azure.
At the end of May, Mistral debuted an open-source coding LLM called Codestral, capable of understanding over 80 programming languages.
As a 22 billion-parameter LLM, Codestral is lightweight yet powerful, standing up against some of the market’s most powerful LLMs.
Conclusion
The AI sector is buzzing with activity, and Mistral’s latest funding round underscores the intense interest in this field. With the market projected to explode to $1.3 trillion over the next decade, investors are eager to back startups poised to become major players. It will be exciting to see how Mistral leverages this investment to push the boundaries of AI and bring state-of-the-art technology to a wider audience.
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