Mistral AI has completed its much-rumored Series B funding round, raising €600 million (roughly $640 million at today's exchange rates) in a combination of equity and debt. The round was led by General Catalyst. As TechCrunch previously reported, the funding round values the startup at $6 billion.
As a reminder, Mistral AI is a relative newcomer to the artificial intelligence space: the company raised a massive $112 million seed round about a year ago to set up a European competitor to OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI giants.
Co-founded by Meta and Google DeepMind alumni, the company is working on developing foundational models that aim to rival today's best-performing models, including OpenAI's GPT-4o, Anthropic's Claude 3, and Meta's Llama 3.
Mistral AI also releases pre-trained and fine-tuned models under open-source licenses with open weights. For example, Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B, and Mistral 8x22B were released under the Apache 2.0 license, an open-source license with no restrictions on use or reproduction other than 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 restricted license and its output cannot be used for commercial activities.
Businesses can use Mistral Large through an API but must pay for usage. The company also offers a chat assistant called Le Chat, which is currently free to use. The company also has sales partnerships with cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, which also has a minority stake in Mistral AI.
“We are pleased that our new and existing investors have renewed their confidence in our business and are providing us with new support for our expansion. This new round puts us in a unique position to pioneer the cutting edge of AI and bring cutting-edge technology to everyone,” Mistral AI co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said in a statement. “It also ensures our company's independence, with full founder control, going forward.”
General Catalyst, which led the Series B round, was an existing investor in the startup. According to the Financial Times, Mistral AI raised €468 million in equity and €132 million in debt (roughly $500 million and $140 million, respectively). The long list of investors includes Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, and Salesforce Ventures.
Other investors include Belfius, Bertelsmann Investment, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance (through its Digital Venture fund), Cisco, Eurazeo, Headline, Hanwha Asset Management's venture fund, IBM, Korelya Capital, Latitude, Millennium New Horizons, Sanabil Investments, ServiceNow and SV Angel.
Mistral AI's work over the past 18 months has been impressive in terms of releasing foundational models, now let's see if they can attract enterprise customers to turn this engineering work into revenue.