After a year since entering the competitive field of generative artificial intelligence with the largest funding round in Europe, amounting to $113 million, Mistral is now securing new additional funds.
The Paris-based startup has announced that it has raised $640 million in funding, increasing its estimated value to around $6 billion.
This investment was led by General Catalyst, with the participation of several new and existing investors, including Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance, as well as the investment arms of IBM, Samsung, Nvidia, Cisco, and Salesforce.
This valuation represents a 23-fold increase in Mistral’s value, which was estimated at around $240 million in June 2023.
Mistral stated: “We are delighted to see both new and existing investors renewing their confidence in our business and providing new support for our expansion. This new round puts us in a unique position to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence, introduce the latest technologies to everyone, and ensure the company’s continued independence.”
The company plans to invest the funds in developing additional computational capabilities and expanding the team across various departments to broaden international marketing efforts and outperform competitors in the global artificial intelligence race, including Anthrobotic and OpenAI.
OpenAI has signed a deal to be the first external provider to integrate its large language models into the iOS 18 operating system.
Since its launch last year, Mistral has gained widespread acclaim for its focus on open-source models and unconventional approach in providing torrent links for downloading and testing models.
The company initially introduced the Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B models, followed by the Mixtral 8x22B and Codestral models, which is a specialized generative artificial intelligence model for programming tasks.
It has also launched the Mistral Large model, surpassing Claude 2, Gemini Pro, and GPT 3.5, featuring native language proficiency in 5 languages and a contextual window containing 32,000 special characters.
Mistral claims to have witnessed over 27 million downloads from public repositories, with open models being used in complex use cases, especially in the financial industry, technology sector, and public sector.
Mistral has accelerated its business efforts through major industrial partnerships. In recent months, the company has collaborated with various tech giants and startups, including Microsoft, Snowflake, Databricks, Capgemini, IBM, and Perplexity.
