Mistral AI Secures $415 Million Investment to Advance in AI Arena

Mistral AI, the French startup poised as a European contender to OpenAI, has successfully wrapped up its Series A funding round. Amassing an impressive €385 million, which translates to around $415 million, the company's valuation is now estimated to be close to $2 billion. Concurrent with this milestone, the commercial platform of Mistral AI has also been launched.

The venture, previously backed by a $112 million seed round, was established by former experts from Google's DeepMind and Meta with the goal of developing foundational models in AI technology with a focus on openness. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has taken the lead in the latest round of financing, with Lightspeed Venture Partners and several other notable names including Salesforce, BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, General Catalyst, Elad Gil, and Conviction participating as well.

Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, underscored the startup's commitment to creating a European powerhouse in the generative AI space that is open, responsible, and decentralized.

The company's initial model, Mistral 7B, is designed on a comparatively modest dataset of 7 billion parameters, not directly contesting with the likes of GPT-4 or Claude 2. In a move towards transparency and accessibility, Mistral AI allowed the model to be freely downloaded under the Apache 2.0 license, enabling developers to operate it locally on their devices or servers, albeit the detailed dataset and model weights have not been publicly disclosed.

Engagement with EU's AI Legislation

Mistral AI actively participated in debates concerning the EU's AI Act, lobbying for an exemption for foundational models and arguing that regulations should target direct end-user applications. Following political agreements in the European Union, companies now face transparency obligations and must provide summaries of their datasets and technical details.

Monetization through API Access

Despite offering free model downloads, Mistral AI plans to profit from its foundational models by opening their beta developer platform. This will allow other businesses to utilize Mistral AI's models through API subscriptions.

The company has introduced a new model, 'Mixtral 8x7B' (Mistral-small), which boasts 45B parameters but uses just 12B per token to balance cost and response time. The innovative router network chooses the most suitable parameters for a given input. This model, along with Mistral-medium – said to surpass previous models in performance – is available through the paid API platform, with no download option provided.

AI, funding, technology