With great anticipation, the Series A fundraising round for Mistral AI, a French startup, has officially ended. The business has raised €385 million, or $415 million in current currency, and Bloomberg estimates that this amounts to a $2 billion valuation for the company. Today, Mistral AI is also launching its business platform.
Less than six months ago, Mistral AI—a European competitor to OpenAI—raised a $112 million seed investment led by former Google’s DeepMind and Meta employees. The company is developing foundational models with an open technology focus.
Lightspeed Venture Partners is reinvesting in the AI business, with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) leading the latest fundraising round. Not only that, but an extensive list of investors, including Salesforce, BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, General Catalyst, Elad Gil, and Conviction, are also taking part in the round.
Co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, Arthur Mensch, said in a statement, “Since the founding of Mistral AI in May, we have been following a clear trajectory: that of creating a European champion with a global vocation in generative artificial intelligence, based on an open, responsible, and decentralised approach to technology.”
Mistral AI unveiled Mistral 7B, their initial model, in September. Since this massive language model was trained on a “small” dataset with about 7 billion parameters, it is not intended to compete with GPT-4 or Claude 2 immediately.
Rather than providing the Mistral 7B model through APIs, the company offered it for free download so developers could use it on their servers and devices.
The Apache 2.0 licence, an open-source licence with no limitations on usage or replication other than attribution, was used to release the model. Although anyone can test the model, it was created behind closed doors using a confidential dataset and unidentified weights.
Mistral AI also significantly influenced the direction of the EU’s AI Act debate. The French artificial intelligence startup has been advocating for a complete exemption for foundational models, arguing that businesses developing products directly used by end users and use cases should be subject to regulation.
Only recently was a political agreement struck by EU parliamentarians. Businesses developing foundational models will be required to publish technical documentation and summaries of the contents of the datasets and comply with specific transparency criteria.
The best model from Mistral AI can currently only be accessed through an API.
The business still intends to profit from its core models. Mistral AI is launching its developer platform in beta today for this reason. Other companies can pay to access Mistral AI’s models through APIs with this platform.
Developers will have access to the new Mixtral 8x7B model (“Mistral-small”) in addition to the Mistral 7B model (“Mistral-tiny”). This model processes input tokens through “a router network” and selects the best set of parameters to provide an answer for.
Because the model only employs a portion of the entire set of parameters for each token, this technique increases model parameters while maintaining cost and latency control. In practical terms, Mixtral employs only 12B parameters per token out of 45B. As a result, it generates output and processes input at the same rate and cost as a 12B model, according to a blog post from the company.
Additionally, Mixtral 8x7B is freely downloadable and provided under the Apache 2.0 licence. On Mistral’s developer platform, a third model called Mistral-medium is accessible. No download link is accessible, and it can only be accessed through the premium API platform. It is said to perform better than Mistral AI’s other models.
In Summary,
In a successful Series A round, Mistral AI raised €385 million ($415 million), reaching a $2 billion valuation. Notable investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. Mistral AI emphasizes an open approach, offering its Mistral 7B model for free download under the Apache 2.0 license.
The startup influenced EU AI Act discussions, advocating for exemptions for foundational models. Mistral AI’s developer platform, featuring models like Mixtral 8x7B (free download) and Mistral-medium (premium API), highlights their commitment to accessibility and innovation. The company’s strategic funding and policy influence position it as a major player in the AI landscape.