Update from June 11, 2024:
The funding is now official, according to the Financial Times. This triples the company's valuation since December to nearly €6 billion.
The round was led by General Catalyst, along with several of Mistral's existing investors, including Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance and BNP Paribas. The company's backers include Nvidia, Salesforce, Samsung, and IBM. OpenAI investor Microsoft is also collaborating with Mistral.
Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral, says in a statement that his company has proven that OpenAI's business model can be "effectively disrupted." Mensch is probably referring to Mistral's open-source models Mistral 7B and Mixtral, which have been successful in the open-source scene and have likely taken over tasks from GPT-3.5 in some applications.
However, to call this a disruption of OpenAI, which is valued at $80 billion, is daring to say the least. Nevertheless, Mistral is currently the best-funded and most important European AI startup. With the fresh capital behind it, the company plans to continue investing in computing power and become a global player.
Mistral employs around 60 people, 45 in France, 10 in the US and 5 in the UK. About three-quarters of them work in product development and research, according to the FT.
Original article dated May 11, 2024:
Mistral AI should soon reach a market capitalization of around $100 million per employee.
In the next round of funding, the French AI startup, with about 60 employees, will be valued at six billion dollars, reports the Wall Street Journal. This will triple Mistral AI's valuation within six months. Existing investors such as General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners are providing about $600 million in the new round.
Mistral AI aims to compete with OpenAI and Google with lower costs and open-source models. Founded just a year ago, the company has raised €385 million to date and has partnered with Nvidia, Microsoft, and Salesforce, among others. While some of its recently released models have performed well, they are not industry-leading.
Mistral also faces strong competition in the open-source space, particularly from Meta's Llama 3. It's not yet clear what the underlying business model might be for second-tier foundational AI models. Like Germany's Aleph Alpha, Mistral will likely try to serve the data-sensitive European markets.