French generative artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI announced today it has closed on its second bumper funding round of the year, raising 385 million euros, or around $415 million, in a deal led by prominent venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The latest round is said to bring Mistral AI’s value to around $2 billion, and is yet another sign that suggests investors are unlikely to quench their thirst for promising generative AI startups anytime soon. The Paris-based startup’s value has risen more than sevenfold just six months after bursting onto the scene in June, when it raised $113 million in a seed funding round just four weeks after it was founded. Its three co-founders all have significant pedigree in the AI industry. Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample both previously worked as researchers at Meta Platforms Inc’s Paris AI Lab, while Arthur Mensch spent time working at DeepMind, an AI research lab that has been a part of Google LLC since 2014. Like its competitors OpenAI and Google, Mistral AI is a developer of large language models, which are a kind of AI that powers chatbot technologies such as ChatGPT and Gemini. ChatGPT famously took the internet by storm late last year with its humanlike ability to hold conversations with users on almost any topic. But Mistral AI differs in its approach. It’s a firm believer that generative AI technologies should be open-source, meaning that the code that underpins its LLMs is freely available for others to use and modify. By taking this open-source approach, the startup is aiming to give other users the tools to quickly build their own, customized chatbots. OpenAI and Google have said in the past that it’s dangerous to do things this way, arguing that the underlying LLMs can be abused and used to create tools that spread disinformation and other malicious content.
Full report : France-based open-source generative AI startup Mistral AI is valued at $2 billion, raises $415M in funding.
