Mistral AI has successfully closed its Series B funding round, securing approximately $640 million through a combination of equity and debt. Led by General Catalyst, this round elevates the company's valuation to $6 billion. With contributions from renowned organizations including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, the capital consists of $500 million in stock and $140 million in debt. Co-founded by former Meta and Google DeepMind employees, Mistral AI wants to create fundamental AI models that can compete with the top technologies on the market, such as GPT-4 from OpenAI, Claude 3 from Anthropic, and Llama 3 from Meta.
Mistral AI, a relatively new entrant in the AI sector, initially raised $112 million in a seed round,establishing itself as a European contender against major AI giants. The company has since released various open-source models like Mistral 7B and proprietary models such as Mistral Large. Its offerings include an API for companies to access its advanced models and a chat assistant named Le Chat. Distribution partnerships with cloud providers, like Microsoft Azure, enable Mistral AI's strategic goal to convert its engineering achievements into significant commercial success.
