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Mistral AI has reportedly raised €468m in equity from various backers, providing more support to a company that is only slightly more than a year old.
French start-up Mistral AI is once again gaining strong support from investors, after raising €600m in equity and debt financing to challenge others in the AI sector.
The funding includes €468m in equity and €132m in debt and values the company at €5.8bn, according to sources speaking with the Financial Times. Sifted received the equity funding details from three sources with direct knowledge of the deal.
The latest funding round was reportedly led by General Catalyst and includes various existing investors such as Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance, Nvidia, Salesforce, Samsung and IBM.
Based in Paris, Mistral was started more than a year ago by former researchers at Google’s Deepmind and Meta and is focused on creating open-source large language models to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Google.
The start-up had a rapid rise to notoriety, as it managed to raise €105m just one month after it was founded – showcasing the hype around the generative AI sector. But the background of its founders and its ambitious open-source goals likely appealed to investors.
Mistral didn’t slow down after this initial fundraise, as it managed to raise a further €385m toward the end of 2023 and reach unicorn status, propelling it into a major player in the AI sector. By the end of last year, the company launched a beta access to its platform services.
Mistral released its most advanced language model, Mistral Large, in February. It said this text-generation model has “top tier” reasoning capabilities and can be used for complex multilingual reasoning tasks including text understanding, transformation and code generation.
Around the same time, Microsoft – which has also invested heavily in OpenAI – struck a deal with Mistral that will see the AI start-up provide commercial language models on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.
Mistral released another major product last month called Codestral, which is designed to support coding tasks. The idea is to help developers save time and effort by assisting them in completing coding functions, write tests and finish partial codes with a ‘fill-in-the-middle’ mechanism.
The French start-up has serious competition from various tech giants and other start-ups that are gaining significant funding gains. The latest funding of Mistral AI comes shortly after Elon Musk’s xAI had a massive fundraise of $6bn to develop its Grok AI chatbots.
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