Mistral AI, a French artificial intelligence start-up created by industry leaders, will raise close to 100 million euros, immediately becoming one of the main European players, one of its investors, according to information from the Spot and the echoes.
This first fundraiser, which will value the young company at 240 million euros, will be one of the largest in France for artificial intelligence, a sector that requires large resources in research and development and computing power.
The round table, led by the US fund LightSpeed Venture, will bring together the main French and European funds and individual investors, according to the same source.
Almost 100 million euros
Mistral AI will feature some of the French AI specialists hired by Gafa, starting with its co-founder and CEO, Arthur Mensch, polytechnic and normalien, expert in language models, former National Institute for Research in digital science and technology (Inria), who just spent almost three years at DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence lab.
Arthur Mensch now presents himself on his LinkedIn page as director and co-founder of Mistral AI, a company in the process of being created and not listed on the INSEE directory.
According echoes AND Point, Arthur Mensch could be accompanied by Guillaume Lample, polytechnic and Facebook AI researcher, one of those at the origin of the LLaMA language model of the Meta group presented in February. Also cited among future recruits, Timothée Lacroix, normalien and on Facebook for eight years.
None of these experts responded to AFP’s requests to confirm this information.
Amounts well below the billions of dollars spent by the American giants
The CEO of online insurance start-up Alan, Jean-Charles Samuelian, will be one of its partners, according to Les Echos and Le Point. Questioned by AFP, Jean-Charles Samuelian did not deny. Several funds and personalities confirmed to AFP his participation, but refused to be quoted.
By way of comparison, the start-up Hugging Face, one of the most dynamic in AI created by the French, which went to finance in the United States, last year raised 100 million dollars during a third roundtable.
For Mistral AI, starting with a fundraising of almost 100 million euros would allow it to aim for larger amounts in the coming years.
However, these amounts are still far less than the billions of dollars spent by US tech giants on their AIs, be it Google, Microsoft or Meta.
Thus, Microsoft would have injected 10,000 million dollars into the OpenAi company, which designed chatGPT, and, according to the American press, OpenAI would consider raising up to 100,000 million dollars.
Source: BFM TV
