AI Firm Mistral To Raise $533M At $5.3B Valuation: Report

OpenAI rival Mistral has resumed conversations with potential investors about raising $533 million, a funding that will push its valuation to $5.3 billion. 

Mistral Seek to Double its Valuation

Securing this fund will help the French-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) firm double its valuation from its current level. Noteworthy, the company generated $415 million at a valuation of a valuation of $2 billion in December 2023. The funding round enjoyed participation from key venture capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and LightSpeed Ventures.

At the time, the $2 billion valuation caused Mistral to rank amongst some of the top AI-related companies, such as Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI. This new potential funding would likely bring the competition closer than it was before now. The names of investors that Mistral is currently engaging are yet to be disclosed to the public according to the Financial Times.

While these investors are yet to fully commit themselves to Mistral’s latest fundraiser, a number of them have demonstrated eagerness to support the Paris-based firm. The possible consistent funding is a reflection of investors’ increased appetite to plunge their funds into certain AI ventures. 

When the funding round eventually happens, the proceeds will be utilized for acquiring chips needed for the training and running of Mistral’s AI models. 

Mistral Responds To OpenAI’s ChatGPT With Le Chat

Like many of its counterparts, it is obvious that Mistral is pushing to advance generative AI by building different Large Language Models (LLMs). Per its goals, it hopes to create humanlike texts as well as code responses to natural language protocols in a very short while. 

Per its technology and growth, Mistral is creating products that have posed a threat to OpenAI. This includes the launch of Le Chat, the free chatbot that was introduced after its partnership with Microsoft. 

Le Chat has a simple question-and-answer interface that understands and can translate three different languages. This functionality is achieved through the presence of three different LLMs, that is, data repositories that allow chatbots to provide answers conversationally. 

It can even understand questions that contain up to 20,000 words in English, in addition to the fact that it is free for use. This design is quite similar to that of ChatGPT apart from the fact that it is currently not entirely open-source.