French generative AI startup and OpenAI competitor Mistral has raised £510m (€600m) Series B. According to reports out today (11 June), the one-year-old company is now valued at £4.9bn (€5.8bn).
The deal, which was forecast by the Wall Street Journal as far back as early May, was led by existing backer General Catalyst. While the Financial Times and others report today that Microsoft, which in February invested €15m in Mistral, did not participate in this round, it was reported in February that its investment would convert into equity. Microsoft has a multi-year partnership with Mistral and is making Mistral’s premium models available to customers in the Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalogue.
Mistral in December last year, advised by Orrick, raised €385m Series A to bolster its team and infrastructure. It was, at that time, valued at $2bn.
Mistral’s latest funding is made up of €468m in equity and €132m in debt and values the company, which was founded in mid-2023, at €5.8bn including the new capital raised, people close to the company told FT.
Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, said: “I am delighted to see new and existing investors renew their confidence in our business and provide new support for its expansion. This new round puts us in a unique position to push the frontier of AI and bring state-of-the-art technology to everyone’s hands. It guarantees the company’s continued independence, which remains fully under the founders’ control.”
Mistral, which has a partnership with gen AI provider Harvey, was founded by Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix. Many of its models are open source, meaning they are freely available for anyone to access, use and modify. Mistral, despite its closed-source model partnership with Microsoft, has vowed to maintain that model.
The round included participation from Lightspeed as well as Andreessen Horowitz, Belfius, Bertelsmann Investment, BNP Paribas, BpiFrance through its Digital Venture fund, Cisco, Eurazeo, Headline, Hanwha Asset Management’s venture fund, IBM, Korelya Capital, Latitude, Millennium New
Horizons, NVIDIA, Samsung venture investment Corporation, Sanabil Investments, Salesforce Venture, ServiceNow, Sofina, and SV Angel.