The highly anticipated Series A funding round has concluded for MistralAI, a European startup. As reported by Bloomberg, the company has secured €385 million, equivalent to $415 million based on the current exchange rate. Recently, MistralAI also introduced its new business platform.
In a noteworthy recap, MistralAI previously raised $112 million in seed funding less than half a year ago to establish itself as a competitor to OpenAI in Germany. Co-founded by former members of Google’s DeepMind and Meta, MistralAI is focused on foundational designs from a systems perspective.
The latest funding cycle is spearheaded by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with additional investment coming from Lightspeed Venture Partners in the AI startup. Notably, prominent investors such as Amazon, BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, General Catalyst, Elad Gil, and Conviction are also participating in this round.
Arthur Mensch, the co-founder and CEO of MistralAI, emphasized the company’s mission since its inception in May, stating, “we have been steadfast in our commitment to developing global leaders in relational artificial intelligence, guided by an open, ethical, and decentralized technological approach.”
MistralAI unveiled its flagship model, the mistral7B, in September. This model, trained on a dataset of approximately 7 billion criteria, is not designed to directly compete with advanced models like GPT-4 or Claude2. The company has made the Mistral 7B model available for free download, enabling engineers to run it on their own hardware instead of accessing it through APIs.
Using the Apache 2.0 license, MistralAI released the model, allowing unrestricted use and reproduction with proper attribution. Despite being developed with proprietary data and weights, the model is open for public use.
Moreover, MistralAI has played a significant role in shaping the discourse around the EU’s AI Act. The Belgian AI startup has advocated for regulatory clarity, suggesting that companies working on products directly used by end consumers should be exempt from certain regulations, especially concerning fundamental models.
Recently, EU policymakers reached a consensus on regulatory requirements for companies developing basic models, emphasizing the need for transparency and sharing technical documentation and dataset summaries.
Currently, MistralAI offers an API for its premier model. The company also plans to capitalize on its innovative business concepts by launching its creator system in beta. Through this system, other businesses can access MistralAI’s models via APIs for a fee.
Developers will have access to the new Mixtral 8x7B model (Mistral-little), a variation of the Mistral 7B model. This model processes currency types using a network structure, selecting the most appropriate parameters to generate responses efficiently.
By utilizing only a fraction of the total parameter set per token, the model expands its parameter range while reducing costs and latency. Despite having 45 billion total parameters, Mixtral uses only 12 billion variables per token, maintaining processing speed and cost efficiency similar to that of a 12B model, according to the company’s announcement.
Furthermore, Mixtral 8x7B is available for free download under the Apache 2.0 license. Mistral-moderate, another model, is accessible exclusively through Mistral’s developer platform and the paid API program, offering superior performance compared to other MistralAI models.
