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Mistral AI Closes $415 Million Series A Funding Round, Launches Commercial Platform
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Reports on Mistral AI's $415M Series A funding round and commercial platform launch, relevant to AI safety as it tracks the rise of a major European open-source LLM competitor and its lobbying efforts around the EU AI Act.
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Summary
French AI startup Mistral AI closed a €385 million ($415M) Series A led by a16z, valuing the company at ~$2 billion. The company simultaneously launched its developer API platform featuring Mistral 7B and the new Mixtral 8x7B mixture-of-experts model. Mistral has also been actively lobbying EU lawmakers on the AI Act, advocating for exemptions for foundational model developers.
Key Points
- •Mistral AI raised $415M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at ~$2 billion just months after a $112M seed round.
- •The company launched a commercial API platform featuring Mistral 7B ('Mistral-tiny') and new Mixtral 8x7B ('Mistral-small') mixture-of-experts model.
- •Mistral AI advocates for open, decentralized AI development and lobbied for foundational model exemptions in the EU AI Act.
- •Mixtral 8x7B uses a router network to select parameter subsets per token, balancing capability with cost and latency.
- •The EU AI Act political deal requires foundational model developers to meet transparency and dataset documentation requirements.
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French startup Mistral AI has officially closed its much anticipated Series A funding round. The company has raised €385 million, or $415 million at today’s exchange rate — according to Bloomberg , it values the company at roughly $2 billion. Mistral AI is also opening up its commercial platform today.
As a reminder, Mistral AI raised a $112 million seed round less than six months ago to set up a European rival to OpenAI. Co-founded by Google’s DeepMind and Meta alums, Mistral AI is working on foundational models with an open technology angle.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is leading the most recent funding round, with Lightspeed Venture Partners investing once again in the AI company. That’s not all, as a long list of investors is also participating the round, such as Salesforce, BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, General Catalyst, Elad Gil and Conviction.
“Since the creation of Mistral AI in May, we have been pursuing a clear trajectory: that of creating a European champion with a global vocation in generative artificial intelligence, based on an open, responsible and decentralised approach to technology,” Mistral AI co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said in a statement.
In September, Mistral AI released its first model called Mistral 7B. This large language model isn’t meant to compete directly with GPT-4 or Claude 2 as it was trained on a “small” dataset of around 7 billion parameters.
Instead of opening access to the Mistral 7B model via APIs, the company made it available as a free download so developers could run it on their devices and servers.
The model was released under the Apache 2.0 license, an open source license that has no restrictions on use or reproduction beyond attribution. While the model can be run by anyone, it was developed behind closed doors with a proprietary and undisclosed dataset.
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Mistral AI also played an important role in shaping the discussions around the EU’s AI Act. The French AI startup has been lobbying for a total exemption for foundational models, saying that regulation should apply to use cases and companies working on products that are used by end users directly.
EU lawmakers
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