The enterprise value of Mistral, an AI startup headquartered in Paris, France, has surged to around 5.8 billion euros (approximately $6.26 billion).
In just half a year since last December, their enterprise value has nearly tripled.
According to the Financial Times on the 11th (local time), Mistral was valued at 5.8 billion euros in the process of raising 600 million euros ($648 million) in capital.
The startup founded in mid-2022 has already grown into a large-scale company with substantial capital.
Mistral issued 458 million euros ($495 million) in stock and 132 million euros ($143 million) in bonds this fundraising.
Mistral is backed by the dominator of the AI semiconductor market Nvidia and Microsoft Corporation(MS), a partner of OpenAI.
Korea’s Samsung Electronics, Salesforce, IBM, and others have also invested in Mistral.
Financial companies such as Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, BNP Paribas, and BPI France are also participating as investors.
MS invested 15 million euros ($17 million) in Mistral last February and decided to use Mistral’s AI software on their Azure cloud platform.
However, they did not participate in this additional fundraising.
Mistral’s capital raising is the largest ever for general-purpose AI (AGI) development outside of Silicon Valley.
Mistral plans to grow into a globally competitive AI company, securing over $1 billion in emergency funds that can be used for urgent purposes.
AI startups in Silicon Valley are also raising additional capital.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, raised $6 billion for his AI startup xAI.
OpenAI, which opened the era of AI with ChatGPT, also attracted $13 billion from MS.
Mistral had raised 150 million euros (approximately $162 million) just a few weeks after its launch in June 2023. At that time, Mistral’s capital raising was one of the largest in European history.
By December of that year, Mistral’s company value had grown to 2 billion euros ($2.16 billion).
Despite attracting significant capital, Mistral is a micro-enterprise in terms of size.
The total number of employees is only about 60, with 45 French, 10 American, and 5 British.
Approximately 75% of the employees are product research and development (R&D) specialists.
Unlike OpenAI, which does not disclose its source, the AGI being developed by Mistral is in open source format. Anyone who wants to test or modify Mistral’s AI to suit their needs can access the AI source.
