Paris, France, Friday, December 8, 2023- In a major boost for Europe’s expanding artificial intelligence (AI) scene, The French company, Mistral, announced a €2 billion valuation following its recent funding round. 1
The hefty price tag, which includes the money raised, pushes the Paris-based company to the forefront of the global AI race and is seen as an indicator of growing investor confidence in European tech innovation. It can be noted that Mistral’s success story comes amid a broader surge in investment in European AI start-ups.
Mistral, founded over a year ago, focuses on developing “Generative AI,” a figure of artificial intelligence capable of creating new content, from written text to images and music.
The company’s technology has impressed investors with its potential applications in various sectors, including marketing, media, and entertainment.
The funding round, by Lightspeed Venture Partners and joined by other prominent investors, will allow Mistral to accelerate its research and development efforts.
Silicon Valley venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz are also among the investors.
The company also plans to expand its team, invest in new hardware and software infrastructure, and explore potential partnerships with established businesses.
If Mistral can live up to its targets, it could become a global leader in this technology, paving the way for a new era of European tech dominance.
Mistral AI claimed that Mixtral, pre-trained on data extracted from the open Web, surpasses Llama 2 70B on most benchmarks with 6x faster inference. They asserted it as the strongest open-weight model with a permissive license and the best model overall regarding cost/performance trade-offs, emphasizing its performance against GPT3.5 on standard benchmarks. 2
However, rivals like OpenAI and Google expressed concerns about Mistral’s open-source approach, stating that the technology could pose risks, potentially spreading disinformation and harmful material.
- ft.com: https://www.ft.com/content/ea29ddf8-91cb-45e8-86a0-f501ab7ad9bb[↩]
- iblnews: https://iblnews.org/mistral-a-french-ai-start-up-is-valued-at-2-billion-in-funding-round/[↩]
