Generative artificial intelligence is attracting investors, and France is no exception. There start-up tricolor Mistral AI, which wants to compete with the American giants of the sector, has just completed a new stage of financing. It is now valued at nearly six billion euros, barely more than a year after its creation.
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There start-up French company, created by former employees of Google and Meta, assured, Tuesday June 11, that it has just garnered 600 million euros in additional financing. Enough to bring its valuation to 5.8 billion euros. Among the investors: the electronic chip manufacturer Nvidia, and the computer giantcomputer science IBM. A few months ago, it was Microsoft that put its hand in its pocket.
“ I am delighted to see new and existing investors renewing their confidence in our business and providing new support for its development », Said Arthur Mensch, boss and co-founder of Mistral AI, in a press release. He added that this new round of funding “ guaranteed the maintenance of the independence of the company, which remains entirely under the control of the founders “.
We are announcing €600M in Series B funding for our first anniversary. We are grateful to our new and existing investors for their continued confidence and support for our global expansion. This will accelerate our roadmap as we continue to bring frontier AI into everyone’s…
— Arthur Mensch (@arthurmensch) June 11, 2024
According to the Financial Times, the French company is now valued three times more than six months ago. A huge amount for such a young entity, even if it is still far from what we can observe in the United States among American tech giants. OpenAI, for example, which launched the robotartificial intelligence ChatGPT is valued at $80 billion.
A French model that aims to compete with ChatGPT
THE start-ups of the sector need a lot of money to develop and have sufficient computing capacity to digest enormous quantities of data. The most powerful electronic chips, for example, which are used to train this software to answer questions or even to create images, are particularly expensive. This money should allow Mistral AI to “ develop its computing power, continue to recruit the best talents and expand its international presence », particularly in the United States after the opening of its branch in California.
The French competitor of the artificial intelligence giants presented a third language model, “Mistral Large”, at the end of February. This model, with performance comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-4, according to Mistral, is available for customers of Azure AI, Microsoft’s platform. Created in April 2023, Mistral AI, whose three French founders come from the ranks of Meta (parent company of Facebook) and Google, has always expressed its desire to offer an alternative option to the models of large American tech companies.
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