On June 11, 2024, the artificial intelligence startup headquartered in Paris, FranceMistral AIannounced it had raised €600 million in Series B funding (€468 million in equity and €132 million in debt), at a valuation of nearly €6 billion (€5.8 billion). The round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, Salesforce Ventures, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, Belfius, Bertelsmann Investments, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Cisco, Eurazeo, Headline, Hanwha Asset Management's venture fund, IBM, Korelya Capital, Latitude, Millennium New Horizons, Sanabil Investments, ServiceNow, and SV Angel, among others.
Mistral AI plans to use the raised funds to expand its commercialization efforts and purchase more computing resources. The company also said this funding round ensures the company's continued independence, fully controlled by its founders.
Mistral AI is a relatively new artificial intelligence startup, co-founded in 2023 by former employees of Meta and Google DeepMind. The company focuses on developing foundation models, with the goal of rivaling current best-performing models such as OpenAI's GPT-4o, Anthropic's Claude 3, and Meta's Llama 3. Mistral AI has also released some pre-trained and fine-tuned models that are open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, with no restrictions on use or reproduction. In addition, the company has launched some proprietary advanced models, such asMistral Large, which are designed to be repackaged as API-first products. Mistral AI also provides a chat assistant calledLe Chat, which is currently free to use, and has established distribution partnerships with cloud service providers such as Microsoft Azure.
(Source:TechCrunch、Financial Times）