In the coming years, generative AI will completely redefine our culture and our lives, how we interact with machines and with each other. There is no question that open solutions will quickly overtake proprietary solutions. They will be guided by the power of the community and the requirement for technical excellence that i projects open source successfull they have always collected. This is the success of the phenomenon Mistral AI French startup born just seven months ago, and which has just raised a (another) round series A worth 385 million euros. The operation was led by Andreessen Horowitz with the participation of LightSpeed Ventures, Salesforce and Motier Ventures, the Parisian family office that owns Galerie Lafayette.
“We have released Mixtral 8x7B, our latest language model. The raised round of 385 million euros will serve to accelerate the delivery of our most useful and convenient open models for the development of artificial intelligence applications,” said founder and CEO Arthur Mensch of Mistral.
Last June this startup found itself on the front pages of innovation magazines around the world for having raised a seed round of 105 million euros just a month after its foundation. Almost half a billion euros in less than a year of existence. The company’s valuation was not disclosed but, according to accredited sources, it would be around 2 billion euros. If this were the case, Mistral would be the next French unicorn (startup valued at more than one billion euros) just eight months after its birth.
The story of Mistral AI
But let’s take a step back. Founded by Arthur Mensch (CEO), Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, all under30 and former employees of Google’s DeepMind and Meta, Paris-based Mistral AI is an AI startup that aims to compete with OpenAI in building, training and applying large language models and generative artificial intelligence. The new startup focuses on solutions open source turning to businesses to create what CEO Arthur Mensch believes is the greatest challenge of the moment: “Making artificial intelligence useful and affordable for everyone.”
Mistral, four weeks old, has already raised a megaround of 105 million euros in June 2023. An operation strongly supported by French President Emmanuel Macron, who on more than one occasion has declared how Europe needs leading companies in everything from technology to energy and defense to avoid dependence on the United States and China.
Leading the maxi operation were important protagonists of the investment scene: Lightspeed Venture Partners, with the participation of Xavier Niel, JCDecaux Holding, Rodolphe Saadé and Motier Ventures (France), Headline (Germany), Exor Ventures (for Italy) and Sofina (Belgium), First Minute Capital and LocalGlobe (for the UK).
Precisely on that occasion, CEO Mensch declared that they would release their open source linguistic model by 2024. Instead, it was news a few days ago, the early release of their first product called Mixtral 8x7B. This is a first text-based language model with an open source license which – according to what is stated on the startup’s website – “would surpass all open models currently available on the market”.
France’s push for AI
The record amount raised by Mistral AI highlights the growing frenzy around generative artificial intelligence and France’s desire to position itself as a European hub, and above all to want to create a viable alternative to the monopoly of Silicon Valley companies such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Anthropic backed by Google’s DeepMind.
Among other things, Mistral was one of the companies that tried to lobby the most to prevent the AI Act, the European regulation on artificial intelligence on which the EU reached an agreement on Saturday 9 December, from imposing constraints (then however inserted in the text) to companies that produce the so-called “foundation models”, i.e. the systems underlying products like ChatGpt.
Not only that, with the inauguration last November of Kyutai, the first independent AI research laboratory with an initial endowment of 300 million euros financed by three well-known co-founders: Xavier Niel, CEO and founder of Iliad, Rodolphe Saadé, president of the CMA CGM group which deals with logistics and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, Paris is becoming the stage for a new chapter in the field of artificial intelligence.
There is no doubt that the disruptive technology of artificial intelligence is changing the world, because it is considered of great impact for various industries from finance to healthcare, which is why it is increasingly at the center of a battle for technological supremacy of governments around the world .