Mistral AI, a Paris, France-based AI startup specializing in open-source software for chatbots and generative AI tools, raised $415 million in a funding round.
This round comes just six months after Mistral AI's seed funding of $113 million, which brought its valuation to around $2 billion. The startup has seen its value increase more than sevenfold within just six months since its founding in June.
SaaS Investors
The round was led by venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) is a venture capital firm that backs bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology. The firm invests in seed- to venture-stage growth-stage technology companies across AI, bio + healthcare, consumer, crypto, enterprise, fintech, games, and companies building toward American dynamism.
Founded in 2000, Lightspeed Venture Partners is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. The firm has regional offices in Israel, India, China, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Lightspeed invests in seed, early, and growth-stage companies in the enterprise, health, fintech, and consumer sectors.
Mistra Plans
The company aims to develop additional "frontier models" for tasks such as summarization and answering questions.
About Mistral AI
Founded by Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix, and Guillaume Lample, Mistral AI is a company developing a generative AI model. It is committed to helping enterprise customers navigate the complex landscape of AI, understanding their specific needs, and guiding them on how to leverage AI tools to address these needs effectively. They are focused on creating, training, and application of large language models and generative AI, technologies that lie at the forefront of the AI industry. The company is on a mission to push AI forward, to serve the open community and its enterprise customers.
Mistral AI released its first LLM, Mistral 7B, in September, which, despite having a smaller size (7 billion parameters), claims to outperform larger rivals in terms of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Funding Details
Company: Mistral AI
Raised: $415.0M
Round: Unknown
Funding Month: December 2023
Lead Investors: Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners
Additional Investors
Company Website: https://mistral.ai/
Software Category: Open-Source Software
Source: https://siliconangle.com/2023/12/10/open-source-generative-ai-startup-mistral-ai-raises-415m-funding/