Mistral Raises $640 Million to ‘Push the Frontier of AI’

French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI reportedly raised 600 million euros (about $640 million) in a Series B funding round.

The fundraise values the startup at $6 billion about one year after its seed round, TechCrunch reported Tuesday (June 11). The Series B round was led by General Catalyst.

Neither Mistral AI nor General Catalyst immediately replied to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

In a statement supplied to TechCrunch, Mistral AI co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said the round included both new and existing investors who are supporting the company’s 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,” Mensch said, per the report. “It guarantees the company’s continued independence, which remains fully under the founders’ control.”

Mistral was valued at around $2 billion in December after raising $415 million.

The company also raised $113 million in June 2023 in what was said at the time to be Europe’s largest-ever round of seed funding. Mistral had been launched only weeks earlier.

Mistral was founded by AI vets from Google and Meta.

Mensch said at the time of the seed round: “There is a rising awareness of the fact that this technology is transformative and Europe needs to do something about it, both as a regulator, as a customer and an investor.”

Mistral unveiled its first generative AI model, the Mistral 7B, in September, saying it had developed more efficient and cost-effective training methods.

In May, the company rolled out generative AI software capable of generating computer code. The model, dubbed Codestral, is trained on a dataset of more than 80 programming languages.

Also in May, Mistral announced it had appointed a new general manager for the United States, saying that Marjorie Janiewicz will be responsible for bolstering the company’s go-to-market presence in the country and leading its American operation.

Janiewicz has 23 years of experience building and scaling revenue teams globally, including tenures as the chief revenue officer for both geolocation platform Foursquare and cybersecurity firm Hackerone.

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