AI AND ML<\/p>\n
Samsung-led round values the French model maker at more than \u20ac21B<\/p>\n
Paris-based AI darling Mistral has raised \u20ac3 billion in Series D funding, giving it a post-money valuation of more than \u20ac21 billion. That makes it a minnow compared with OpenAI, but Mistral says it is the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company.<\/p>\n
Mistral is pitching itself as a sovereign alternative to US giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The company wrote<\/a>: “During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model. <\/p>\n “Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop.”<\/p>\n Mistral’s answer, unsurprisingly, is its own combination of open-weight models, infrastructure, and compute capacity. The pitch is aimed at organizations and public sector bodies increasingly wary of relying on overseas tech giants. The company’s customers include aeronautics giant Airbus.<\/p>\n Mistral has logged some impressive growth in its three years of existence. A year ago, it announced<\/a> Series C funding of \u20ac1.7 billion at a post-money valuation of \u20ac11.7 billion. That round was led by ASML, with Nvidia and Andreessen Horowitz among the participants. Samsung Electronics, the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund, and existing investor PSG Equity jointly led the latest round.<\/p>\n On the global AI funding scale, however, Mistral remains considerably smaller. OpenAI, for example, closed a round containing $122 billion in committed capital in March, giving it a post-money valuation of $852 billion. Even so, Mistral is a big beast in Europe, and its position has been helped by moves such as the US administration slapping export restrictions on Anthropic in June<\/a>. The restrictions were later lifted, but not before adding to European jitters about reliance on overseas technology.<\/p>\n That said, Mistral is not above some participation in the AI investment merry-go-round<\/a>. It has accepted investment from Nvidia while spending money on datacenters packed with the GPU giant’s technology.<\/p>\n