Now valued at $6 billion, Mistral is gaining fresh cash amid the open source AI boom.

AI startup Mistral has closed a funding round worth 600 million euros (about $644 million), the Paris-based company announced on Tuesday. The fundraising reportedly builds on the company’s valuation of $6 billion. That’s nearly three times the company’s $2 billion valuation in less than six months.

“Mistral AI’s value has roughly tripled since December and has grown about 25x over the past 12 months,” Mistral AI researcher Devendra Chaplot wrote on LinkedIn, adding that the company is hiring.

The Series B funding round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from high-profile investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, Salesforce Ventures, Cisco, and IBM.

“We would like to thank our new and existing investors for their continued trust and support of our global expansion,” Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral AI, said on Twitter. “This will accelerate our roadmap as we continue to put cutting-edge AI into everyone’s hands.”

The cash injection could make Mistral the world’s most valuable open source AI company, behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks, and the fourth-largest AI company in general. The company was founded in April 2023 by a team that includes former employees of Meta and Google’s DeepMind AI project.

In announcing the fundraising, Mensch highlighted the capital-intensive nature of the industry, noting that increased computing power and talent acquisition are needed to “break down the barriers to artificial intelligence.” He said the capital will accelerate the company’s roadmap and strengthen its computing capacity, hiring efforts and global expansion plans, especially in the United States.

Mistral AI has focused on commercializing its proprietary model through customized API-based products for enterprise customers with specific business requirements, primarily targeting privacy or personalization. At the same time, the company developed and released open source models such as Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mixtral 8x22B under the Apache 2.0 license, making them accessible to developers and researchers.

This open source focus is a key element of Mistral AI’s success. By comparison, Stability AI, which develops Stable Diffusion, the world’s leading open source image generator with virtually no competition, is valued at over $1 billion.

Both companies are still dwarfed by OpenAI, the leading AI company. OpenAI tripled its value in a deal in February that valued it at a whopping $80 billion.

At a technical level, Mistral’s highly efficient models can outperform their larger counterparts across a variety of benchmarks, making the open source model competitive with leading commercial AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 2, or Google’s Gemini Pro. can. LMsys Chatbot Arena Leaderboard.

Mistral AI offers a free chatbot, but its revenue streams include enterprise plans, proprietary model licensing on a pay-per-token basis, and a soon-to-be-released API that enables fine-tuning of models for customers through usage fees or subscriptions. The company also plans to commercialize the model through a multi-year partnership with the Microsoft Azure platform that includes $16.3 million in investment and equity participation.

The AI ​​boom has revitalized the open source industry with significant contributions from major technology companies. Meta leads the way with 1909 open source models released to date. Google contributed over 800, Microsoft shared 300 models, and Apple contributed 47.

Huge investments are being made in AI development across a variety of fields beyond the open source community. Several AI startups, including Inflection.ai, Modal.com, Character.ai, and Perplexity.ai, have recently secured significant funding rounds to advance their generative AI applications.