Mistral AI raises €385m at a valuation of $2 Billion

Mistral AI, a French startup, has recently raised €385m to be valued at a prominent amount of $2 billion to become a unicorn. The company, launched in May 2023, has become a key player in the open-source large language models. 

The round saw notable investors such as Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), Nvidia, and Salesforce. A16z confirms its role in the investment. Mistral had secured €105 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners just a month after its inception. According to The New York Times, Lightspeed Venture Partners was also involved in the round.

With roots tracing back to former researchers from Google’s Deepmind and Meta. The core focus of the company is on developing open-source large language models. This offers an alternative approach in the AI market. This strategy positions them as a unique entity among its competitors. 

Mistral also announced their free 7B language model in September 2023 and launched beta access to its platform on December 11. The company has been getting a lot of traction in a dedicated community that is enthusiastic about open-source AI.

A16z, in a blog post, highlighted the importance of Mistral’s approach, “Mistral is dedicated to the mission of bringing open source AI models to the world. We believe they are picking up where other AI labs and big companies have left off, fostering open research, open models, and open collaboration in the AI community.”