Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI raises $640 million
Mistral AI has closed its much rumored Series B funding round with General Catalyst leading the round. The company has secured €600 million (around $640 million at today’s exchange rate) in a mix of equity and debt. As TechCrunch previously reported, the startup is now valued at $6 billion following this funding round.
As a reminder, Mistral AI is a relatively new entrant in the artificial intelligence space. The company raised a massive $112 million seed round around a year ago to set up a European rival to OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI giants.
Co-founded by Google’s DeepMind and Meta alums, Mistral AI is working on foundational models with the aim to rival the best performing models today, such as 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 instance, Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B and Mistral 8x22B were released under the Apache 2.0 license, an open source license that has no restrictions on use or reproduction beyond 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 generative AI model for code, has a restrictive license as its outputs can’t be used for commercial activities.
