Within only one year a Paris-based AI startup has ascended its way up the ladder to become a major force in the industry.
Mistral AI, created by former employees from Meta Platforms Inc (Nasdaq: META) and Google DeepMind, just revealed that it raised C$886 million in a Series B funding round this week. The tech developer’s valuation has nearly tripled since December and currently sits at C$8.6 billion.
This recent funding round was led by San Francisco’s venture capital firm General Catalyst. The firm pooled funds from Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA), Andreessen Horowitz, Cisco Systems Inc (Nasdaq: CSCO) and several others.
French President Emmanuel Macron is known to take pride in Mistral, describing it as “French genius.” He once invited its co-founder and chief executive Arthur Mensch to dine at the Élysée Palace.
Microsoft Corp (Nasdaq: MSFT) invested C$22 million into the large language model (LLM) creator back in February too.
“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,” Mensch said. Mistral is considered to be the main European rival of OpenAI, Anthropic and other top industry influences.
“Despite having significantly fewer resources than some of the large foundation model companies so far, I think they’ve really shocked everybody by putting out incredibly high-quality models approaching GPT-4 in calibre,” a representative from Sequoia Capital said at the firm’s AI Ascent event at the end of March.
With $640M raise @ 6B+ valuation, Mistral AI has grown ~3x in valuation since December and ~25x in the last 12 months!
Join us to build the next generation of AI models in a small and extremely talented team. We are hiring in Paris, London & SF/Bay Area:https://t.co/WXoIbYwCh4 pic.twitter.com/eNFt0YnL6A
— Devendra Chaplot (@dchaplot) June 11, 2024
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What distinguishes Mistral from the rest?
The company says its AI models, such as the free “Le Chat” chatbot released in February, have a superior command of multiple languages than the competition.
Mistral also claims that its models offer unrivalled cost efficiency for their respective sizes. These include optimized models like Mistral Small, Mistral Large, Mistral Embed and a series of open source models similar to GTP-3 and Google’s BERT.
In a nutshell, optimized models prioritize performing specific tasks while open source models focus on community-inspired development.
“When tailoring a smaller model to suit specific domains or use cases it offers a way to match the performance of larger models, reducing deployment costs and improving application speed,” Mistral said in a blog post on Jun. 5 regarding the “fine-tuning” capabilities it has with its LLMs. The AI developer says it can provide a custom-tailored model at a significantly lower price than the competition.
Other influential early-stage AI developers with offices in Europe include Synthesis, Verses AI Inc. (CBOE: VERS) (OTCQB: VRSSF), Aleph Alpha, Stability AI and PhysicsX.
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