Mistral AI, a Paris-based open and portable generative AI service for developers and businesses, announced it has raised €600 million in a Series B funding round. General Catalyst led the round, which also included Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Nvidia, Salesforce, Samsung, and IBM. The valuation of the company is now estimated to be about €6 billion.
Mistral also has a distribution partnership with Microsoft Azure. And Microsoft is a minor shareholder in Mistral AI.
With this funding round, the company has raised about €1.1 billion in total. Last year Mistral raised €385 million at a $2 billion valuation. This funding round is believed to be nearly 80% in equity and 20% in debt.
Under the Apache 2.0 license and Mistal’s three open-source models, Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mixtral 8x22B are usable and customizable for a variety of use cases. They can be downloaded or used on demand via Mistral’s platform.
Mistral’s goal is to make frontier AI ubiquitous and to provide tailor-made AI to all the builders. This requires independence and a strong commitment to open, portable and customizable solutions, with a focus on shipping the most advanced technology in limited time.
Using Mistral’s models, the businesses can:
- Automate large-scale text generation and processing — Use Mistral models to process, summarize, classify, or translate any kind of text. You can summarize a long report, classify customer reviews, translate emails into other languages, and generate marketing campaigns.
- Build an internal assistant with RAG and function calling — Give employees easy access to internal company knowledge by building retrieval-augmented (RAG) applications. You can use the company’s state-of-the-art embedding model for that and the function-calling capacities of our models.
- Empower developers with a coding assistant — Leverage your developers with a custom-built coding co-pilot and accelerate your coding speed. And Mistral models have proven to be particularly strong in coding, making them a great asset to accelerate application development or even IT legacy modernization.
- Tailor applications to your customer base — The company’s multilingual models can be tuned to follow a certain editorial line and used to generate content that is appropriate for your customers.
With this funding round, Mistral plans to accelerate its AI work and enhance its position in the industry.
KEY QUOTE:
“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 hands.”
– Company statement
