Building at the speed of light
Less than 6 months after announcing our inaugural investment in the Mistral founders and their vision, we’re very excited to announce that Mistral has raised a €385 million Series A to further fuel their mission to push open models to the frontier and making state of the art generative models available to businesses.
In a world where everything is spinning faster and faster, it’s easy to forget that the Mistral founders only recently joined forces. If you’re looking for the definition of fast pace and speed, look no further. Marc Benioff once said, “speed is the new currency of business,” and Mistral is very much open for business.
In less than 6 months, they’ve:
- Built a top-tier team from scratch (they’re hiring)
- Released Mistral 7B, a SOTA model outperforming models twice its size
- Garnered global interest with millions of developers downloading and building on top of their models
- Released Mixtral 8x7B which matches or outperforms Llama 2 70B, as well as GPT3.5, on most benchmarks
- Released access to their API with three chat endpoints for text generation leveraging the top models of the Mistral family
Belote-Rebelote
With the release of “La plateforme,” it was only fitting to roll out a French analogy: Belote, the most popular card game in France with over 9 million players, features the rule of “Rebelote,” which rewards additional points for doubling down and pairing the king and queen together. We’ve had the privilege of witnessing the impressive speed and execution of Mistral firsthand, and we are proud to make a significant contribution to this new funding round by doubling down.
Looking back on the funding announcement from June, we outlined a few beliefs:
- “Their goal was to create a European, open source project with the ambition of becoming a major global player in Generative AI.”
→ As Co-Founder Arthur Mensch said, “We play the main league,” and the goal with this new capital infusion is to go all in, with the means to have the best players on the field.
- “Mistral’s ambition is to build a credible open-source alternative to some of the early Large Language Model players while contributing and giving back to the community.”
→ The road ahead is still long but, with the announced model releases, Mistral is positioning itself as the primary player in this race, bringing the strongest open generative models to developers, along with efficient ways to deploy and customize them for production.
- “We believe that Europe has a decisive role to play in the AI field. As the politicians and European leaders recognise the importance of their role in this new emerging world order, it is imperative that Europe remains a fertile ground for innovation to uphold European values but also further contribute to European digital sovereignty.”
→ With the EU AI Act as a backdrop, we strongly believe that transparency around technological progress benefits safety and with companies like Mistral we, as Europeans, are well equipped to play a decisive role in this growing AI field.
We have unwavering conviction in supporting visionary founders with ambitious ideas and it’s safe to say that we have found that kind of team in Mistral.
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