Mistral, a competitor of Open AI, is valued at nearly $2 billion and has prestigious shareholders such as A16z and Nvidia.
French AI startup Mistral AI's latest round of financing is in its final stages, with a valuation of approximately $2 billion. Shareholders include A16z, Nvidia, Salesforce, and others. The company, founded less than a year ago, has been hailed as the "European version of Open AI." All three founders of Mistral are core founders of Llama, and they have made a name for themselves in the field of AI with their development efficiency and open-source advantages. Previously, Mistral raised $113 million in seed funding.
Investors continue to bet on AI startups, and another European AI unicorn is emerging.
According to insiders, the latest round of financing for French AI startup Mistral AI, totaling 450 million euros, is in its final stages. Shareholders include A16z, Nvidia, Salesforce, and others.
The financing includes a lead equity investment of over 325 million euros from A16z, as well as 120 million euros in convertible bonds from Nvidia and Salesforce. A16z is currently in negotiations for a 200 million euro investment. Specific details may change.
It is reported that each of Mistral's three co-founders has agreed to sell over 1 million euros worth of shares as part of the deal, and three other insiders at Mistral will also sell their shares.
According to a previous report by Wall Street News, insiders who are familiar with the negotiations have revealed to the media that the participation of well-known investment institutions such as A16z may push Mistral's valuation to 1.5-2 billion euros.
"The Next OpenAI"
Mistral is one of the most prominent AI startups in Europe and is known as the "European version of OpenAI". It was founded in May this year by former scientists from DeepMind and Meta.
Mistral's three co-founders are CEO Arthur Mensch, Chief Scientist Guillaume Lample, and CTO Timothée Lacroix. They are all core creators of Llama (released by Meta), and Guillaume Lample led the development of Llama.
In just over half a year since its establishment, Mistral has become a rising star in the AI field, challenging the AI giants in Silicon Valley with its development efficiency and open-source advantages.
In June, Mistral raised a huge amount of $113 million in seed funding, with participation from European veteran venture capital firms such as Redpoint and Index Ventures.
In October, Mistral was the only European company to participate in the Global AI Engineer Summit, sharing the stage with tech giants such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta.
In November, Mistral released the open-source large-scale model Mistral 7B, which is comparable to Llama 270B but performs better on a scale one-tenth of the latter.
According to the paper, Mistral-7B outperforms Llama 2 (13B) in all benchmark tests and surpasses Llama 2 (34B) in inference, math, and code generation tasks. It can be said that the release of Mistral 7B signifies that Mistral has successfully achieved a breakthrough in balancing the parameter size and performance of large language models. Arthur Mensch, the founder of Mistral, once stated in an interview with the media that although they are still a young startup company, Mistral aims to compete with the entire AI industry, including giants like Google and OpenAI. They are committed to open-source work on large-scale models:
"We have always been pioneers in this technology." "We compete with everyone."