Mistral AI Secures $640M in Series B Funding, Aims to Rival AI Giants
Mistral Looks to compete with AI leaders like OpenAI and Meta
Created on June 12|Last edited on June 12
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Paris-based Mistral AI has successfully closed a Series B funding round, raising €600 million ($640 million) through a combination of equity and debt. Led by General Catalyst, the round brings the startup's valuation to $6 billion. Mistral AI, founded by former Meta and DeepMind employees, aims to compete with major AI players such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
GPU Allowance?
With this substantial funding, Mistral AI now has the financial capability to significantly expand its computing resources. The $640 million could potentially be used to purchase around 25,600 Nvidia H100 GPUs, given the approximate cost of $25,000 per unit, or around 16,000 of the newer H200 GPUs, estimated at $40,000 each. This level of investment in hardware would place Mistral AI in a strong position to enhance its AI model training capabilities.
LLaMA 3
To put this in perspective, Meta's largest language model, Llama 3, was trained using 24,000 of Nvidia's flagship H100 chips. At an estimated cost of $30,000 per H100 GPU, Meta's investment in GPU hardware alone totaled approximately $720 million . This comparison highlights the significant financial resources required to develop cutting-edge AI models and underscores Mistral AI's ambitious plans.
The Company
Since its inception, Mistral AI has released several foundational models under open source licenses. These include Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B, and Mistral 8x22B, available under the Apache 2.0 license. Additionally, the company has proprietary models like Mistral Large, designed for commercial use through a pay-per-use API.
Mistral AI's portfolio also includes Codestral, a generative AI model for coding with a restrictive commercial use license, and a free-to-use chat assistant called Le Chat. The company has established distribution partnerships with cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, with Microsoft being a minor shareholder.
The Series B round saw contributions from notable investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, and Salesforce Ventures. Other investors include BNP Paribas, IBM, and SV Angel, among others.
The Future
Co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch expressed enthusiasm about the funding, emphasizing the company's commitment to remaining independent and advancing AI technology. "This new round puts us in a unique position to push the frontier of AI and bring state-of-the-art technology to everyone’s hands," Mensch stated.
Mistral AI's focus now is on converting their technological advancements into revenue by attracting corporate customers, building on their impressive track record over the past 18 months.
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