Mistral AI – a company that makes computing efficient, useful, and powerful AI models – recently announced it raised €385 million. This puts the company’s valuation at about US$2 billion.
Timothée Lacroix, Guillaume Lample, and Arthur Mensch founded Mistral. Lacroix and Lample previously worked at Meta’s AI lab in Paris. And Mensch previously oversaw research at DeepMind, which is an AI company that Google acquired for $650 million in 2014.
Andreessen Horowitz led this round of funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners also invested in Mistral again in this round. Other investors who joined this round include Salesforce, Bpifrance, CMA-CGM, Elad Gil, and Eric Schmidt.
The company is also launching its commercial platform.
“We start simple: la plateforme serves three chat endpoints for generating text following textual instructions and an embedding endpoint. Each endpoint has a different performance/price tradeoff,” said the company in a blog post. “The two first endpoints, mistral-tiny, and mistral-small, currently use our two released open models; the third, mistral-medium, uses a prototype model with higher performances that we are testing in a deployed setting. We serve instructed versions of our models. We have worked on consolidating the most effective alignment techniques (efficient fine-tuning, direct preference optimization) to create easy-to-control and pleasant-to-use models. We pre-train models on data extracted from the open Web and perform instruction fine-tuning from annotations.”
Mistral AI was originally created in May. And the company has been focused on creating a “European champion” with a global vocation in generative AI based on an open and decentralized approach to technology.
