French AI startup Mistral raises $640 million at $6 billion valuation

Paris-based Mistral raises $640 million at $6 billion valuation with the intent to expand their teams and commercialise their AI chatbots globally.

Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI has raised €600 million, or around $640 million, in a mix of debt and equity for its Series B funding round, pulling its valuation up to nearly $6 billion.

Led by General Catalyst, the funding saw participation from Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance and the investment arms of IBM, Samsung, Cisco and Nvidia.

Cofounded by former Meta and Google DeepMind engineers, Mistral came into the spotlight after raising $112 million in the largest-ever seed round seen in Europe, a year ago. An additional $415 million brought in during late last year hiked the company’s valuation to more than $2 billion.

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“I am delighted to see new and existing investors renew their confidence in our business and provide new support for its expansion. This new round puts us in a unique position to push the frontier of AI and bring state-of-the-art technology to everyone’s hands,” Mistral AI co-founder and CEO, Arthur Mensch, said in a statement. “It guarantees the company’s continued independence, which remains fully under the founders’ control.”

The firm said it intends to use the funds to build more compute capacity and expand their teams across departments to scale commercialisation globally and remain a robust contender in the AI race.

The startup released a slew of open-source models that are competing with OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini Pro and Anthropic AI’s Claude 2.