Mistral AI has closed its much rumored Series B funding round with General Catalyst leading the round.
The company has secured €600 million (around $640 million at today’s exchange rate) in a mix of equity and debt.
As a reminder, Mistral AI is a relatively new entrant in the artificial intelligence space.
It also has distribution partnerships with cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure — Microsoft is also a minor shareholder in Mistral AI.
According to the Financial Times, Mistral AI raised €468 million in equity and €132 million in debt (around $500 million and $140 million respectively).
French AI startup Mistral is introducing new AI model customization options, including paid plans, to let developers and enterprises fine-tune its generative models for particular use cases.
Mistral has released a software development kit (SDK), Mistral-Finetune, for fine-tuning its models on workstations, servers and small datacenter nodes.
For developers and companies that prefer a more managed solution, there’s Mistral’s newly launched fine-tuning services available through the company’s API.
Compatible with two of Mistral’s models for now, Mistral Small and the aforementioned Mistral 7B, Mistral says that the fine-tuning services will gain support for more of its models in the coming weeks.
Lastly, Mistral is debuting custom training services, currently only available to select customers, to fine-tune any Mistral model for an organization’s apps using their data.
Elsewhere, Mistral, the French AI startup, launched a new model to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4 — and its own cheekily named chatbot dubbed Le Chat.
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PodcastsOn Equity, the crew talked through startup news from Microsoft and Mistral AI, Thrasio and Glean — and also covered happenings over at COTU Ventures and Zacua Ventures.
But Microsoft and Mistral AI buried the news — or at least an important part.
At the time, the company raised €385 million (around $415 million) with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) leading the investment round.
Unlike previous Mistral AI releases, Mistral Large isn’t open source.
With this investment, Microsoft is now an investor in OpenAI’s capped profit subsidiary and Mistral AI.
As for Mistral AI, the so-called European AI champion looks more and more like its American competitors with a closed-source approach and a long list of American backers.
Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is gradually building an alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic as its latest announcement shows.
Founded by alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta, Mistral AI originally positioned itself as an AI company with an open-source focus.
Mistral AI’s business model looks more and more like OpenAI’s business model as the company offers Mistral Large through a paid API and usage-based pricing.
Mistral AI claims that it ranks second after GPT-4 based on several benchmarks.
The first benefit of that partnership is that Mistral AI will likely attract more customers with this new distribution channel.
At CES 2023 in Las Vegas, hidden among the thousands of dazzling displays and exhibits was the upgraded 2023 Bugatti electric scooter. It was the kind of thing that could…
