Mistral AI has closed its much-rumored Series B funding round, raising €600 million (about $640 million at today's exchange rate) in a mix of equity and debt. General Catalyst led the round. As TechCrunch previously reported, the startup is now valued at $6 billion after this funding round.
As a reminder, Mistral AI is a relatively new entrant into the artificial intelligence space. The company raised a large seed round of $112 million about a year ago to establish a European rival to OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI giants.
Co-founded by alumni of Meta and Google's DeepMind, the company builds on core models with the goal of competing with today's best performing models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4o, Anthropic's Claude 3 and Meta's Llama 3. is working
Mistral AI has also released pre-trained and fine-tuned models under an open source license with open weights. For example, the Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B and Mistral 8x22B were released under the Apache 2.0 license, an open source license with no restrictions on unattributed use or reproduction.
Mistral AI's latest models, such as the Mistral Large, are proprietary models designed to be repackaged as API-first products. Codestrelle, the company's first generative AI model for code, has a restrictive license, as its outputs cannot be used for commercial activities.
Companies can use Mistral Large through an API that requires them to pay per usage. The company also offers a chat assistant called LeChat that is currently free to use. The company also has distribution partnerships with cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure — Microsoft is also a minor shareholder in Mistral AI.
“I'm thrilled to see new and existing investors renewing their faith in our business and providing new support to expand it. This new era will allow us to push the frontier of AI and make cutting-edge technology accessible to everyone.” puts it in a unique position to bring in the hands,” Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, said in a statement. “This guarantees the continued independence of the company, which remains entirely under the control of the founders.”
General Catalyst, which led the Series B round, was an existing investor in the startup. Mistral AI raised €468 million in equity and €132 million in debt ($500 million and $140 million, respectively), according to the Financial Times. The long, 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, Hanwha Asset Management's Venture Fund, IBM, Korelya Capital, Latitude, Millennium New Horizons, Sanabil Investments, ServiceNow and SV included. .
Mistral AI's work over the past 18 months has been impressive when it comes to releasing core models. Now, let's see if it can attract corporate customers to turn this engineering work into revenue.