French AI startup, Mistral AI, recently made headlines by successfully closing its Series A funding round, raising €385M. This accomplishment catapults the startup’s valuation to a staggering $2B.
- AI Race: The company made this financial stride in less than six months, following a seed round that amassed $112M. The aim was to establish a European equivalent to OpenAI.
- Inception: Mistral AI’s foundation is the brainchild of alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta, and they’re diligently working on foundational models with a focus on open technology. Mistral was Timothée Lacroix, Guillaume Lample, and Arthur Mensch.
- Backers: Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) spearheaded the most recent funding round, and Lightspeed Venture Partners recommitted their investment in the AI startup. Furthermore, the round saw participation from high-profile investors such as Salesforce, BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, General Catalyst, Elad Gil, and Conviction.
- Public Debut: Mistral AI has also unveiled its commercial platform to the public. It released its inaugural model, Mistral 7B, in September. Developers can freely download the Mistral 7B model, courtesy of its release under the Apache 2.0 license. This avails the model for anyone to run on their servers and devices, although it was developed privately with an undisclosed proprietary dataset.
- Political Impact: Mistral AI has been instrumental in shaping dialogues surrounding the EU’s AI Act, lobbying for foundational models to be completely exempted. They argue that regulations should focus on use cases and companies whose products directly interact with end-users.
- Other Offerings: The company’s most refined model to date can only be accessed through an API. Mistral AI plans to monetize its foundational models, hence the opening of its developer platform in beta. Here, other firms can pay to use Mistral AI’s models via APIs. Alongside the Mistral 7B model (“Mistral-tiny”), developers can now access the new Mixtral 8x7B model (“Mistral-small”). This model employs a “router network” to process input tokens and select the most suitable parameter set for an answer.
This innovative startup is poised to pave the way for open technology. As Mistral AI continues to grow and make strides in the field of artificial intelligence, we can only expect more developments and impact on both society and business.
