The Paris-based AI development company Mistral AI has raised an astounding €600 million (around $640 million) to close its Series B funding round through equity and debt financing. Currently, the startup is valued at $6 billion following this funding round. The fresh investment was led by General Catalyst, according to TechCrunch.

About Mistral AI

  • The company was co-founded by former employees of Meta and Google’s DeepMind, Arthur Mensch, Charles Gorintin, Guillaume Lample. They develop AI models intended to compete with the latest innovations such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 3, and Meta’s Llama 3.
  • Mistral AI has released pre-trained and finely-tuned open-source models, such as Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B, and Mistral 8x22B, under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows unrestricted use and reproduction, except for attribution. Its most advanced models, like Mistral Large, are proprietary developments designed for transformation into API-accessible products.
  • Companies can access Mistral Large via an API, with fees based on usage volume. Mistral AI also offers a free chatbot named Le Chat. Additionally, Mistral AI has partnership agreements with Microsoft Azure, a minority shareholder in the company.
Mistral AI team photo
Image by Mistral AI:
Mistral’s team

Investment details

American VC fund General Catalyst led the fresh Series B round. Previously, it has already invested in the startup. According to the Financial Times, Mistral AI has raised €468 million in equity capital and €132 million in debt (approximately $500 million and $140 million, respectively). The long list of investors also included Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, and Salesforce Ventures.

Other investors include Belfius, Bertelsmann Investment, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance (through the Digital Venture fund), Cisco, Eurazeo, Headline, venture fund Hanwha Asset Management, IBM, Korelya Capital, Latitude, Millennium New Horizons, Sanabil Investments, ServiceNow, and SV Angel.

After this round of financing, the value of Mistral AI reached $6 billion.