Mistral, Month-Old AI Startup, Raises $113 Million
Mistral AI, a French startup, is said to have raised a record-breaking $113 million in seed funds.
The company was started by AI experts from Google and Meta, and it just started up a few weeks ago, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday (June 13).
In that report, it says that this was the biggest seed round ever recorded in Europe. This shows that AI is still attracting investments even though the number of deals is going down.
“There is a rising awareness of the fact that this technology is transformative and Europe needs to do something about it, both as a regulator, as a customer and an investor,” Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s chief executive and a former DeepMind researcher, told the FT.
The funding round was led by Antoine Moyroud of Lightspeed Venture Partners. He said that the size and speed of Mistral’s funding show how skilled its leaders are.
“There’s a pool of 80 to 100 people globally who have the level of experience they have,” Moyroud said. “Right now, for better or for worse, the capital requirements in compute and top-tier talent make [launching an AI start-up] quite a capital-intensive game.”
The FT story says that Mistral hasn’t made its first product yet because its employees just started working a few days ago. The company plans to release a new large language model (LLM) at the beginning of 2019 that will be similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Jason Verlen, senior vice president of product management at CCC Intelligent Solutions Inc., said that LLM hasn’t even started to reach its full potential yet.
“A lot of what’s being done with large language models can actually go much further — not just improving performance, but unlocking new business use-cases [and even new businesses],” said Verlen. “The possibilities inherent in AI for driving new horizons of efficiency and productivity in the macro environment are almost unbelievable.”
Verlen is excited about the possibilities of AI. His business makes a cloud platform for the insurance and auto industries.
“This really is an exciting time,” Verlen said, adding that the business world has begun to leave behind the “Wave One” of AI platforms pre-trained using public data and while shifting into what he calls “Wave Two.”
“Wave Two is where organizations take control, using generative AI on their own in-house data to solve narrower problems with domain-specific, secure, and high-provenance data.”
