Paris-based AI startup MistralAI raises 600M euros

TapTechNews June 12. According to a report by the Financial Times early this morning Beijing time, the Paris-based AI startup MistralAI has now raised 600 million euros in funds, and its valuation is close to 6 billion euros (TapTechNews note: currently about 7.2 billion US dollars). The company is supported by Microsoft and NVIDIA. It has just turned one year old since its establishment and is regarded as a 'potential challenger' to OpenAI.

Since (last) December, investment in the company has tripled its valuation. Arthur Mensch, the chief executive of Mistral, said in an interview: 'From the very beginning of entrepreneurship, we were told... this is a market that will never be disrupted. But we prove that this is not the case, and we effectively disrupted OpenAI's business model.'

For Mistral, a startup headquartered outside Silicon Valley and dedicated to building large-scale general artificial intelligence (AGI) models, the latest round of financing is its largest deal so far. Because Mistral plans to use the more than 1 billion euros raised in funds to grow from a European champion to a global competitor.

Currently, the co-founders of Mistral, Timothée Lacroix, Guillaume Lample, and Mensch, are still the major shareholders of the company, and they are all French AI researchers who used to work at Google DeepMind and Meta.

Mensch revealed that Mistral uses 'lightly more than' 1,000 high-performance graphics processing unit chips required for training AI systems and spends tens of millions of euros to build products that can be comparable to those built by global giants such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta.

Two weeks ago, Musk also raised 6 billion US dollars (currently about 43.586 billion yuan) for his own startup xAI, and competitors are targeting the leading advantage of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, which has received 13 billion US dollars (currently about 94.436 billion yuan) in support from Microsoft.