June 12, 2024
Mistral AI, an Open Source AI French Startup has revealed today that it has successfully raised $640 million in Series B funding, a mix of debt and equity, elevating its valuation to nearly $6 billion. Relevant for crypto as open-source AI could be used to build secure and transparent financial systems, improve fraud detection in crypto transactions, and even power new decentralized applications (dApps) that leverage AI for tasks like data analysis or risk management.
Project | Latest Raise | Latest Raise Date | Stage | Total Raise | Lead Investor | Category |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mistral AI | $640M | June 12, 2024 | Series B | $752M | General Catalyst | AI |
The funding round was spearheaded by General Catalyst, with significant contributions from a host of new and existing investors, including Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance, and the investment divisions of IBM, Samsung, Salesforce, Cisco, and Nvidia. This development signifies a remarkable 23-fold surge in Mistral’s valuation, which stood at a mere $240 million in June 2023.
Mistral AI intends to utilize the funds to enhance its compute capacity and expand its team across various departments to escalate its international commercialization efforts and effectively compete with global AI contenders, including OpenAI and Anthropic. Notably, OpenAI recently signed a contract to become the inaugural third-party LLM provider to be included with Apple software in the upcoming iOS 18.
About Mistral AI
Mistral AI is a Paris-based artificial intelligence startup that specializes in large language models (LLMs). Co-founded by former Meta employees Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, and former DeepMind researcher Arthur Mensch, Mistral AI launched in April 2023. The company offers advanced AI technology for processing and generating human-like text. Its models are transparent, portable, customizable, and cost-effective, requiring fewer computational resources than other popular LLMs. Mistral AI provides several models for free use under a fully permissive license.
One of its notable models is Mistral 7B, a 7.3B parameter model that outperforms many on various benchmarks, including code and reasoning4. The company recently secured $640 million in Series B funding, raising its valuation to nearly $6 billion.
Website: https: https://mistral.ai/
X Account: https://x.com/MistralAI
X Followers today: 94,318
X Followers 30 days ago: 91,546
X Change: 2,772 (+3.03%)
About Investor
Investor: Faculty Group
General Catalyst is a venture capital firm that was founded in 2000 and is based in San Francisco, California. The firm is known for backing founders who actively seek to change the status quo across various sectors, such as consumer, enterprise, fintech, crypto, health, and assurance. They have invested in global companies, including Airbnb, Kayak, Datalogix, Datto, Livongo, Gusto, Buildkite, Warby Parker, Oscar, Deliveroo, Lemonade, Stripe, and Snap
As of 2020, General Catalyst was ranked as one of America’s largest venture capital firms. In February 2022, it raised $4.6 billion for its 11th general fund, bringing the firm’s total raised in its 20-year history to $14.75 billion. By September 2022, General Catalyst had invested in 17 European startups. In April 2023, the company had invested in 25 Indian startups.
Location: Massachusetts, United States
Website: https://www.generalcatalyst.com/
A central focus of investor activity in the cryptocurrency space is the evaluation of new crypto projects to invest in, particularly those with huge potential. This blog provides insight into what new ventures are benefiting from venture capital support (VC funding in crypto). These new crypto projects, funded by professional investors, can dictate the next narrative in crypto and the next big crypto movers.
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