French AI startup Mistral appears to have an irresistible appetite for investor money. The company is reportedly seeking hundreds of millions of euros in funding, based on an estimated market valuation of more than 4.6 billion euros.
The company believes such a valuation is achievable due to the performance of its new open source model Mixtral 8x22B, which has recently begun to turn a profit, The Information reports. Mixtral 8x22B’s expert mix architecture minimizes hardware usage and improves efficiency by activating only relevant neural networks after a prompt appears.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were raised
Mistral has already secured four investments in the past year. The first funding round, 105 million euros, took place in June 2023, shortly after the company was founded. A second investment of 385 million euros was made in December, raising the company’s valuation to around 2 billion euros.
Next, Microsoft decided to invest in Mistral AI. This is notable since the company previously used only OpenAI. Mistral received $16.3 million (€15.2 million) from the American tech giant, which was considerably less than Microsoft’s previous investment in OpenAI of around €11.9 billion. Mistral’s latest investment includes an undisclosed amount from Databricks.
Mistral’s commercial products include Mistral Large, an advanced LLM, a more cost-effective model called Mistral Small, and an enterprise chatbot similar to ChatGPT. To compete with OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-5 and other well-funded rivals, Mistral will need to invest even more into LLM development. Additional capital will definitely help.
Mistral’s LLM used in US systems
Microsoft recently indicated that it plans to make Mistral AI’s LLM available in the Azure cloud. Earlier this year, AWS announced that he would use two of his LLMs at Amazon Bedrock. One of those is his open source LLM Mixtral 8x22B, which was launched last week and, according to internal evaluations, performs better than competing products.
One of the things that sets Mistral’s model apart, and perhaps also a feature of its European nature, is that it supports more languages ​​other than English, such as French, German, Spanish, and Italian.
The French startup’s model is better than OpenAI’s GPT model because it is open source. This increases transparency for customers and provides more options in terms of customization.
At the same time, Mistral AI is considering the option of using a closed LLM. That’s the approach taken with Mistral Large. It includes a paid API, which costs 7.30 euros for an input of 1 million tokens and 22 euros for the same amount of output.
Also read: LLM for Europe: Mistral AI puts Europe on the AI ​​map
