Mistral AI has accomplished a highly popular Series B financing round, raising €600 million (roughly $640 million at today’s exchange rates) in a combination of equity and debt. General Catalyst led the round. As TechCrunch previously reported, the startup is now valued at $6 billion following this round of funding.
As a reminder, Mistral AI is a relatively latest entrant in the artificial intelligence space. About a yr ago, the company raised a whopping $112 million to create a European rival to OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI giants.
The company, co-founded by graduates of Meta and Google’s DeepMind, is working on core models to compete with today’s best models, resembling OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3, and Meta’s Llama 3.
Mistral AI has also released pre-trained and tuned models under an open source license with open scales. For example, Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B, and Mistral 8x22B were released under the Apache 2.0 License, an open source license that imposes no restrictions on use or reproduction beyond attribution.
The most advanced Mistral AI models, resembling Mistral Large, are proprietary models designed to be repackaged as API-first products. Codestral, the company’s first generative AI model for code creation, has a restrictive license because its results can’t be used for business purposes.
Companies can use Mistral Large via an API, which they are going to have to pay for depending on how often they use it. The company also offers a chat assistant called Le Chat, which is currently free to make use of. The company also has distribution partnerships with cloud solution providers resembling Microsoft Azure – Microsoft is also a minority shareholder in Mistral AI.
“I am glad that new and existing investors renew their trust in our business and provide new support for its development. This new round puts us in a unique position to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence and make cutting-edge technology accessible to everyone,” Mistral AI co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said in a statement. “It guarantees the continued independence of the company, which remains under the full control of the founders.”
The existing investor in the startup was General Catalyst, which led the Series B round. According to Financial Times., Mistral AI raised EUR 468 million in equity and EUR 132 million in debt (roughly USD 500 million and USD 140 million, respectively). The very long list of investors includes Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation and Salesforce Ventures.
Other investors include Belfius, Bertelsmann Investment, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance (through its Digital Venture Fund), Cisco, Eurazeo, Headline, enterprise capital fund Hanwha Asset Management, IBM, Korelya Capital, Latitude, Millennium New Horizons, Sanabil Investments, ServiceNow and SV Angel .
Mistral AI’s work over the last 18 months has been impressive in terms of releasing core models. Now let’s see if we will attract enterprise customers who will turn engineering into revenue.