Open-source AI developer Mistral closes €3B funding round
French artificial intelligence lab Mistral AI SAS today announced that it has raised €3 billion, or about $3.49 billion, in funding.
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. led the investment. It was joined by more than two dozen other backers including Salesforce Ventures, Nvidia Corp. and ASML Holdings NV, which led Mistral’s last round. The startup is now valued at more than €20 billion.
It’s best known for its lineup of open-source large language models. Its flagship LLM, Mistral Medium 3.5, outperforms algorithms several times its size on popular coding benchmarks. The company also develops more specialized models. In August, it debuted a so-called guard model optimized for tasks such as protecting LLMs from malicious prompts.
Mistral makes money by selling managed cloud-based versions of its algorithms. Additionally, it offers development tools that enterprises can use to build their own custom LLMs.
