Mistral AI, OpenAI's French Competitor, Raises €450M at $2B Valuation: Get the Details

Paris-based Mistral AI, an artificial intelligence startup, is set to raise €450M from investors, including Nvidia Corp and Salesforce, at a valuation of $2B. The deal includes over €325M in equity from investors, with Andreessen Horowitz leading the talks to invest €200M in funding. Nvidia and Salesforce have also agreed to invest an additional €120M in convertible debt. The company’s co-founders and chief advisor will sell shares worth more than €1M each. Mistral AI recently released Mistral 7B, its first large language model (LLM) under the open-source Apache 2.0 license. The model is optimized for compressing knowledge and deep reasoning while reducing training time, cost, and energy consumption. Mistral AI specializes in developing generative AI models and open-source software for chatbots and generative AI tools. The startup was launched in May and valued at $259M in June after raising $113M in seed funding, the largest-ever seed round in Europe.