Mistral AI, a French artificial intelligence start-up created by industry leaders, announced on Tuesday that it has finalized a €105 million fundraiser, a record for a French artificial intelligence company.
Mistral wants to offer companies open source language models, the first of which will be available in early 2024.
The round table is chaired by the American fund Lightspeed Venture, together with the big bosses Xavier Niel and Rodophe Saadé, as well as the funds JCDecaux Holding, Motier Ventures -the Galeries Lafayette fund-, La Famiglia and Headline in Germany, Exor Ventures in Italy , Sofina in Belgium or even First Minute Capital and LocalGlobe in the United Kingdom, Bpifrance and the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt.
best researchers
If Mistral AI has suddenly excited investors, amid a fundraising freeze for most startups, it’s no doubt because the company was co-founded by three French AI researchers who worked for Gafa American.
Its CEO, Arthur Mensch, 30, an expert in language models, has just spent nearly three years at DeepMind, Google’s AI lab. The other two co-founders come from Meta (Facebook): Guillaume Lample is one of the creators of the LLaMA language model presented by Meta in February and Timothée Lacroix was also a researcher at Meta.
Mistral AI develops and trains large open source language models for enterprises, to enable them to use generative artificial intelligence in their infrastructure while maintaining control of their data and intellectual property.
This acquisition, which Mistral values at 240 million euros – less than the unbridled valuations of 2020 and 2021 – must be used to finance the training of models, which are expensive in terms of computing power, the company specified.
A far cry from the American giants
The founding team will also be able to count on the experience of Jean-Charles Samuelian and Charles Gorintin, co-founders of the neoinsurer Alan, and Cédric O, former Secretary of State for Digital.
The Élysée and the government are conspicuously at this new player’s bedside, while Europe has so far been largely outpaced by the United States in the AI race.
Thus, Emmanuel Macron, who inaugurates VivaTech on Wednesday, will speak on stage alongside Arthur Mensch, and the Delegate Minister for Digital, Jean-Noël Barrot, tweeted on Tuesday night to congratulate the young company.
However, these amounts are still far less than the billions of dollars spent by the American giants on their AI, be it Google, Microsoft or Meta.
Source: BFM TV
