According to reportsMightygriffinmegawaysFrench start-up Mistral AI, known as the "European OpenAI", is about to enter a new round of financing, valuing it at about $6 billion, almost triple what it was six months ago.
Existing investors General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners are expected to be the biggest fundraisers in the new round, with Mistral AI expected to raise about $600m, according to people familiar with the matter.
It is reported that in February this year, Mistral AI announced a partnership with Microsoft (MSFT)MightygriffinmegawaysUs) to introduce its open and business model into Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, which is its first distribution partner. It is reported that the American technology giant has also acquired a small stake in the company.
So far, Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, and OpenAI has created a series of large language models (LLM), such as GPT-4 and GPT 3.5. Mistral AI said in February that its artificial intelligence model, Mistral Large, had achieved strong results in common benchmarks, making it the second most widely used model in the world to pass API, after GPT-4.
Mistral AI, founded a year ago by local researchers from GOOGL.US (GOOG) and Meta (META.US), was valued at more than $2 billion in December, more than seven times that of last summer, the report said.
Arthur Mensch, chief executive of Mistral AI, said his company aims to beat Silicon Valley companies such as OpenAI and Google in artificial intelligence competitions by developing and selling low-cost artificial intelligence tools for companies, which perform almost as well as OpenAI's ChatGPT, the report added.
As of December, Mistral AI had raised more than $500m from investors and promised to sell small stakes to companies in artificial intelligence such as NVDA.US, Microsoft and CRM.US. Some Mistral models can also be used on cloud platforms operated by Google and Amazon.
