OpenAI’s Paris-based rival raises $640m at $6b valuation

Mistral AI team in Paris / Photo credit: Mistral AI

Mistral AI, a Paris-based AI firm, has wrapped up its series B funding round, raising 600 million euros (US$640 million), the company announced. The funding round, which was co-led by General Catalyst, pushed Mistral AI’s value to US$6 billion, according to a TechCrunch report.

Co-founded by former Meta and Google DeepMind employees, Mistral AI works on foundational models that aim to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Meta’s Llama 3, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.

Alongside the fresh funding, Mistral AI introduced its first AI coding model, Codestral, though its licensing currently does not allow the model’s outputs for commercial use. It also offers more advanced models like its flagship Mistral Large – the company claims this model is second only to GPT-4 in terms of massive multitask language understanding.

Aside from General Catalyst, Mistral AI’s backers include Lightspeed, Nvidia, and Samsung. Andreessen Horowitz had led its US$485 million series A fundraise in December 2023, which came just months after its seed round.

The French company said that this new capital injection would support its global expansion and accelerate its roadmap, though it did not elaborate further.

The funding round comes as AI took even more of a center stage globally in recent weeks. Earlier this week, Apple announced a slew of new AI-powered offerings, as well as its integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which helped push the company’s stock to a new all-time high.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk-founded AI startup xAI had secured US$6 billion late in May this year.

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Currency converted from euro to US dollar: US$1 = 0.93 euros.