Paris-based Gen AI startup Mistral is “not for sale” and is instead planning to become a publicly-listed company, according to cofounder Arthur Mensch.
In an interview with Bloomberg during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mensch said he is often asked whether Mistral will be taken over, but that the company plans to stay independent.
“We left big US tech to create a company in Europe, to show that Europe had something to say,” said Mensch. “That’s still the project and so the independence we have is something that we value dearly.”
When asked if Mistral would IPO, Mensch said: “Of course that’s the plan.”
Mistral was cofounded in Paris in 2023 by Meta and DeepMind alumni, with the objective to create a European AI player that could compete against US-based Big Tech companies like OpenAI.
The French startup builds Gen AI models similar to those that power AI assistants like ChatGPT.
It quickly rose to fame, raising more than €1bn in less than a year. Its latest fundraise, a €600m Series B (including €468m in equity), valued the company at €5.8bn — the highest valuation for an AI startup in Europe.
Mensch said that Mistral’s growth has been “quite tremendous” and that the startup has been seeing lots of traction in Europe and in the US, where it started hiring a team last year. The company now plans to open an office in Singapore, he said.
“A startup is always raising money but we have plenty,” Mensch said. “We will obviously continue to accelerate and that might require new fundraising.”
In October, Mistral competitor OpenAI raised $6.6bn at a $157bn valuation. Elon Musk-backed startup xAI, which also builds Gen AI models, raised $6bn in December. And Anthropic, a Gen AI company backed by Amazon, has been reported to be nearing a $2bn investment at a $60bn valuation.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/mistral-ai-not-for-sale-arthur-mensch-news/
