Paris-based Mistral AI, an artificial intelligence startup, is on the verge of closing €450M from investors, including Nvidia Corp and Salesforce, at a valuation of $2B.
As per Bloomberg’s report, the deal comprises over €325M in equity from investors, with Andreessen Horowitz leading the talks to invest €200M in funding.
According to a report, Nvidia and Salesforce have agreed to invest an additional €120M in convertible debt. However, some details are still subject to change, the report says.
As per the agreement, the company’s three co-founders, Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix, and Guillaume Lample, will sell more than €1M worth of equity each.
The sale of shares also includes Mistral AI’s chief advisor, former French minister Cedric O.
The announcement comes a couple of months after the startup released Mistral 7B, its first large language model (LLM) under the open-source Apache 2.0 licence in September.
Mistral-7B is a foundational model based on customised training, tuning, and data processing methods.
This optimised model allows for the compression of knowledge and deep reasoning capacities despite having few parameters.
These optimised foundational models can lead to benefits in sustainability and efficiency by reducing training time, cost, energy consumption, and the environmental impact of AI.
Mistral AI: Pushing AI forward
Mistral AI is a platform that assembles teams to develop generative AI models.
The French company specialises in open-source software for chatbots and generative AI tools.
Its founders have experience working on large language models similar to those developed by OpenAI.
The startup was launched in May and valued at $259M in June, following a record $113M in seed funding, the largest-ever seed round recorded in Europe.
Read the orginal article: https://siliconcanals.com/news/startups/openai-rival-mistral-ai-to-close-450m/
