Arthur Mensch, founder of French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI, attended the Viva Technology exhibition held at the Porte de Versailles Exhibition Center in Paris, France on May 22, 2024.
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French tech startup Mistral AI has raised €600 million ($645 million) in funding as money continues to pour into the artificial intelligence race.
The funding round, announced by the company on Tuesday, values Mistral AI at 5.8 billion euros (about $6.2 billion), a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly told CNBC.
Mistral AI did not disclose many details about this round of financing. but Financial Times Venture capital firm General Catalyst reportedly led the round, with existing investors also participating.
The French startup has been around for just over a year, but has already raised a huge amount of funding and is competing with OpenAI to become the European artificial intelligence champion. Mistral AI is building so-called large language models (LLMs), which underpin applications such as the chatbots popularized by ChatGPT.
Such efforts are costly and require significant infrastructure investments, such as purchasing Nvidiaof semiconductors.
Mistral’s seed round, which refers to a very early stage investment in the company, amounted to €105 million alone when the company announced the investment last year.
Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch has become a rock star in Europe’s tech scene as the continent’s startups look to compete with US giants such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
However, these giants are also looking to partner with these young companies. In February of this year, Microsoft announced its investment in Mistral.
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“This will accelerate our roadmap as we continue to put cutting-edge artificial intelligence into everyone’s hands,” he added.
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