Proactive Investors - France's Mistral AI, the artificial intelligence startup founded a year ago by alumni from Meta (NASDAQ:META) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL)'s DeepMind, has been valued at $6 billion in its second funding round.
The Paris-based outfit raised $640 million in its 'series B' funding round, which was led by US venture capitalists General Catalyst and also included NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), Salesforce and Samsung (KS:005930)'s investment arms, taking its total investment to $1 billion in its first year.
The new funding is aimed at expand its compute capacity and team to accelerate commercialization internationally.
Mistral AI's CEO and co-founder, Arthur Mensch, said on X: “This will accelerate our roadmap as we continue to bring frontier AI into everyone’s hands.”
We are announcing €600M in Series B funding for our first anniversary. We are grateful to our new and existing investors for their continued confidence and support for our global expansion. This will accelerate our roadmap as we continue to bring frontier AI into everyone’s…— Arthur Mensch (@arthurmensch) June 11, 2024
The France-based company is working on generative AI to take on the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, with several pre-trained and fine-tuned models already released under open-source licenses.
Mistral says its mission is to "make frontier AI ubiquitous, and to provide tailor-made AI to all the builders", with AI models open-source able to support multiple languages.
Mistral AI differentiates itself by offering integrated, cost-effective model customization on its proprietary platform, allowing users to fine-tune models with minimal expertise and flexible infrastructure options, thus enhancing accessibility and efficiency in AI deployment.
Industry media said the company's speed in releasing foundational models in its first year has been key to attracting such significant investment.
Announcing @MistralAI fine-tuning API! https://t.co/lG0XimuyVj— Mistral AI Labs (@MistralAILabs) June 5, 2024
Customers using Mistral technology so far include bank BNP Paribas (EPA:BNPP), telephone network Orange, shipping company CMA CGM, database manager MongoDB (NASDAQ:MDB), and AI firms Lamini and OctoAI.