Paris-based Mistral AI banks a whopping €105M seed round for its generative AI

Paris-based Mistral AI, a platform specialising in generative artificial intelligence, announced that it has secured over €105M in a seed-stage round of funding. According to TC, the startup is currently valued at €240M.

The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Antoine Moyroud, Partner at Lightspeed, says, “We believe that Europe has a decisive role to play in the AI field. As politicians and European leaders recognise the importance of their role in this new emerging world order, Europe must remain a fertile ground for innovation to uphold European values and further contribute to European digital sovereignty.”

“Our investment in Mistral, and all our portfolio companies in Europe, are evidence of our firm conviction that a new generation of global players will emerge from this ecosystem,” adds Moyroud.

Mistral AI: Everything you need to know

Founded by key figures from the AI research teams at Meta and Alphabet, Mistral AI will give companies the fundamental tools to automate current operations and create new products using “state-of-the-art” large language models.

Co-founder and CEO of Mistral, Arthur Mensch, met Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, the other two co-founders, as students at École Polytechnique and École Normale Supérieure. 

The trio wanted to establish an open-source European initiative with the potential to dominate the field of generative artificial intelligence globally.

The founders also have another thing in common. While working on Machine Learning applications in some of the biggest AI labs in the world, they had the chance to develop deep technical experience in their respective domains.

Arthur had a key role in the Retro, Flamingo, and Chinchilla projects while working at DeepMind, where he gained expertise in the optimisation of large language models. Together with Timothée, Guillaume oversaw the creation of the LLaMa large language models. 

Lightweight reports, when the models’ weights were leaked, LLaMa caught the globe by storm at the start of the year, igniting a tidal wave of open-source enthusiasm.

Mistral AI aims to become a credible open-source alternative to some of the pioneers of the Large Language Model while giving back to the community.