Mistral AI is announcing €600M in Series B funding for their first year of operations.
Mistral AI said the funding from the investment round will accelerate its roadmap as it continues to bring frontier AI into everyone’s hands. The company is developing various generative AI models.
Based in Paris, France, the company aims to support fast, open-source, and secure language models. It has built products with the help of a team in Europe and is targeting a global market.
While sharing more details, Mistral AI confirmed that it finalized its Series B funding round, acquiring €600 million as part of a mix of equity as well as debt.
General Catalyst has reportedly led the funding round. The company is valued at $6 billion after this round. Mistral AI is a new entrant in the AI sector. The firm reported a $112 million seed round around a year back and will aim to compete with other players like OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI-focused innovators.
Co-founded by Meta and Google’s DeepMind ex-workers, the firm will support foundational models and aim to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3, among others.
Mistral AI has introduced pre-trained models via an open-source license with open weights.
Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B, and Mistral 8x22B were introduced via the Apache 2.0 license, which is an open source license with no set limits on use or reproduction (only attribution is required).
Mistral AI’s models, like Mistral Large, are proprietary models meant to be repackaged as API-enabled products. Codestral, the firm’s GenAI model for code, comes with a restrictive license, as its outputs may not be used for commercialized initiatives.
Firms may leverage Mistral Large via an API that they will need to pay for according to the time they spend using it.
The firm also provides chat assistants known as Le Chat that is free to use. The firm also has distribution partnerships with cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure.
General Catalyst, which has reportedly led the latest round, was already an investor in the firm.
Mistral AI secured €468 million in equity as well as €132 million in debt, according to a report from the FT. Some notable investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, and Salesforce Ventures.
Mistral AI’s ongoing work in the last 1.5 years has been solid when it comes to introducing foundational models.
