French AI lab Mistral AI is in early discussions to raise about €3 billion ($3.5 billion), Bloomberg informed Friday, citing unnamed sources.
The funding round will value the company at around €20 billion (about $23.15 billion), almost double its valuation of €11.7 billion. get in a Series C funding round last September.
One of Europe’s leading AI startups, Mistral was launched in 2023 with the stated ambition to “put frontier AI into the hands of everyone.” The company has taken a more open approach to its AI development than its US rivals. Offering Some basic large language models with open weights, allowing anyone to customize them as they wish.
The company also offers discontinued models designed for use cases such as programming, voice cloning and generation, and optical character recognition.
Recently, with European countries distance The Mistral based itself on American technology. deployed itself as a friendly, “sovereign” and domestic alternative. the company is setting up A data center near Paris and partnered with french armyThe government of luxembourgAnd many major european companies.
Yet, according to PitchBook, Mistral has raised only $4 billion to date, a fraction of US rivals OpenAI ($186 billion) and Anthropic ($161.25 billion). The valuations of these labs are also very high, reflecting how far ahead US labs have come in revenue, model adoption, and enterprise demand.
Mistral did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
