France’s Mistral AI Raises $113 Million in Big EU Startup Debut

Benoit Berthelot and Mark Bergen, Bloomberg News

A person typing at a backlit computer keyboard arranged in Danbury, U.K., on Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2020. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Mistral AI, a new startup from former DeepMind and Meta Platforms Inc. researchers, has raised €105 million ($113 million) in an initial financing round to become “a new global player” in artificial intelligence, the company said in a statement Tuesday.

The Paris-based startup is the latest to try to take on OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google in developing the base infrastructure for generative AI, technology capable of generating text and images based on a few prompts. Mistral’s funding is one of the largest seed rounds ever for a European generative AI company. Last year’s splashy debut of Stabilty AI, by contrast, raised $101 million.

Founded just this year, Mistral enters a competitive landscape. The tech industry in Silicon Valley and beyond is crowded with entrants vying to develop AI models, including OpenAI, which has raised more than $10 billion in funding.

Mistral was formed by three researchers: Timothée Lacroix, 31, and Guillaume Lample, 32 — who both previously worked at Facebook parent Meta — and Arthur Mensch, 30, formerly of Google’s DeepMind.

The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Several individual investors also participated, including French billionaires Rodolphe Saadé and Xavier Niel, as well as former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt.

Mistral said it will release its first models in early 2024.