Paris-based AI company called Mistral AI raises $640 million

Mistral AI gets €600 million in Series B funding, led by General Catalyst. This puts the AI startup’s value at $6 billion, positioning it to compete with OpenAI and Meta.

Mistral AI has closed its much-talked-about Series B funding round, which raised €600 million (about $640 million today) in debt and equity. The round was led by General Catalyst. Based on an earlier report, the startup is now worth $6 billion after this round of funding.

Just to remind you, Mistral AI is a fairly new company in the field of artificial intelligence. About a year ago, the company raised a huge $112 million in a seed round to build a European AI giant that could compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and others.

Former employees of Meta and Google’s DeepMind founded the company. They are building foundational models that will compete with the best models on the market right now, like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3, and Meta’s Llama 3.

Under an open-source license that allows anyone to view the weights, Mistral AI has also shared models that have already undergone training and fine-tuning.

For example, Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B, and Mistral 8x22B were released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is an open-source license that doesn’t put any limits on how they can be used or copied as long as they are credited.

Mistral AI’s most advanced models, such as Mistral Large, are private models designed for repackaging as API-first products. Codestral is the company’s first generative AI model for coding. The license restrictions prevent the use of its outputs for business purposes.

A company can use Mistral Large through an API, but they will need to pay for it based on how much they use it. The business also has a chatbot called Le Chat that you can use for free right now.

The company also collaborates with cloud service providers such as Microsoft Azure to sell its products. Microsoft also has a small stake in Mistral AI.

“I’m glad that both new and old investors are putting their faith in our business again and giving it more help to grow.” Charles Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, said in a statement, “This new round puts us in a unique position to push the edge of AI and bring cutting-edge technology to everyone.” “It ensures that the company will remain independent and fully controlled by its founders.”

General catalyst leads series B round for Mistral AI

General Catalyst led the Series B round because it already had money in the startup. The startup raised a total of €468 million in equity and €132 million in debt.

This equates to between $500 million and $140 million. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, and Salesforce Ventures are just a few of the many investors on the list.

BNP Paribas, Bpifrance (through its Digital Venture Fund), Cisco, Eurazeo, Headline, Hanwha Asset Management’s Venture Fund, IBM, Korelya Capital, Latitude, Millennium New Horizons, Sanabil Investments, ServiceNow, and SV Angel are some of the other companies that have put money into the company.

Putting out foundational models over the past 18 months has been some of Mistral AI’s best work. Now let’s test whether it can get business clients to turn this engineering work into money.