Mistral AI has closed its much-rumored Series B funding round, raising €600 million (around $640 million at today’s exchange rate) in a mix of equity and debt. General Catalyst led the round. As TechCrunch previously reported, the startup is now valued at $6 billion following this funding round. As a reminder, Mistral AI is a relatively new entrant in the artificial intelligence space. The company raised a massive $112 million seed round about a year ago to set up a European rival to OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI giants. Co-founded by alumni from Meta and Google’s DeepMind, the company is working on foundational models with the aim to rival the best performing models today, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3 and Meta’s Llama 3. Mistral AI has also released pre-trained and fine-tuned models under an open source license with open weights. For instance, Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B and Mistral 8x22B were released under the Apache 2.0 license, an open source license that has no restrictions on use or reproduction beyond attribution. Mistral AI’s most advanced models, such as Mistral Large, are proprietary models designed to be repackaged as API-first products. Codestral, the company’s first generative AI model for code, has a restrictive license, as its outputs can’t be used for commercial activities. Companies can use Mistral Large through an API that they’ll have to pay for according to how much they use it. The company also offers a chat assistant called Le Chat that is currently free to use. The company also has distribution partnerships with cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure — Microsoft is also a minor shareholder in Mistral AI.

Full story : Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI raises $640 million, now valued at a whopping $6 billion.