Mistral AI has closed its much rumored Series B funding round with General Catalyst leading the round. The corporate has secured €600 million (around $640 million at today’s exchange rate) in a mixture of equity and debt. As TechCrunch previously reported, the startup is now valued at $6 billion following this funding round.
As a reminder, Mistral AI is a comparatively recent entrant in the bogus intelligence space. The corporate raised an enormous $112 million seed round around a yr ago to establish a European rival to OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI giants.
Co-founded by Google’s DeepMind and Meta alums, Mistral AI is working on foundational models with the aim to rival the most effective performing models today, equivalent to GPT-4o, Claude 3 and Llama 3.
Mistral AI has also released pre-trained and fine-tuned models under an open-source license with open weights. As an example, Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B and Mistral 8x22B were released under the Apache 2.0 license, an open source license that has no restrictions on use or reproduction beyond attribution.
Mistral AI’s most advanced models, equivalent to Mistral Large, are proprietary models designed to be repackaged as API-first products. Codestral, the corporate’s first generative AI model for code, has a restrictive license as its outputs can’t be used for business activities.
Corporations can benefit from Mistral Large through a paid API with usage-based pricing. The corporate also offers a chat assistant called Le Chat — it’s currently free to make use of. It also has distribution partnerships with cloud providers, equivalent to Microsoft Azure — Microsoft can also be a minor shareholder in Mistral AI.
“I’m delighted to see recent and existing investors renew their confidence in our business and supply recent support for its expansion. This recent round puts us in a singular position to push the frontier of AI and produce state-of-the-art technology to everyone’s hands,” Mistral AI co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said in a press release. “It guarantees the corporate’s continued independence, which stays fully under the founders’ control.”
General Catalyst is leading the Series B round. The VC firm was an existing investor within the startup. In response to the Financial Times, Mistral AI raised €468 million in equity and €132 million in debt (around $500 million and $140 million respectively). Other investors include Lightspeed Enterprise Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Enterprise Investment Corporation, Salesforce Enterprise and an extended, long list of investors.
Prepare for that list, here we go. Other investors include Belfius, Bertelsmann Investment, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance through its Digital Enterprise fund, Cisco, Eurazeo, Headline, Hanwha Asset Management’s enterprise fund, IBM, Korelya Capital, Latitude, Millennium Latest Horizons, Sanabil Investments, ServiceNow and SV Angel.
Mistral AI’s work over the past 18 months has been impressive with regards to releasing foundational models. Now, let’s see if it will probably attract corporate customers to show this engineering work into revenue.
