Mistral AI has closed its much-rumored Series B funding round, with General Catalyst leading the round. The company has 600 million euros (about $640 million at current exchange rates) in equity and debt. As TechCrunch previously reported, the startup is now valued at $6 billion after this funding round.
Again, Mistral AI is a relatively new entrant into the field of artificial intelligence. The company raised a massive $112 million seed round about a year ago to establish a European company that would compete with OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI giants.
Mistral AI, co-founded by Google's DeepMind and Meta alumni, is developing its baseline model to compete with today's best-performing models, including 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. For example, Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B, and Mistral 8x22B are released under the Apache 2.0 License, an open source license with no restrictions on use or reproduction other than attribution.
Mistral AI's most advanced models, such as Mistral Large, are proprietary models designed to be repackaged as API-first products. Codestral, the company's first code-generating AI model, has a restricted license as its output cannot be used for commercial activities.
Enterprises can leverage Mistral Large through a paid API with usage-based pricing. The company also offers a chat assistant called Le Chat, which is currently available for free. We also have distribution partnerships with cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure. Microsoft is also a minority shareholder in Mistral AI.
“We are delighted to see new and existing investors renewing their confidence in our business and providing new support to expand our business. “This new round puts us in a unique position to push the boundaries of AI and put cutting-edge technology into everyone’s hands.” Mistral AI co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said in a statement. “This ensures the continued independence of the company, which remains entirely under the control of its founders.”
General Catalyst is leading the Series B round. The VC firm was an existing investor in the startup. According to the Financial Times, Mistral AI has raised €468 million in equity and €132 million in debt (about $500 million and $140 million, respectively). Other investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, Salesforce Venture, and a long, long list of investors.
Have that list ready. Here it is. 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 Angel. There is this.
Mistral AI's work over the past 18 months has been impressive with respect to the launch of its base model. Now let's see if we can attract enterprise customers to turn this engineering work into revenue.
