Can you guess what it is yet? Here’s a clue: It starts with ‘A’ and ends with ‘I’
The French recipient of Europe’s largest ever seed round doesn’t have a product and was founded four weeks ago. The few employees it has only started work in the last few days.
All the same, Mistral AI hoovered up €105 million ($113 million) from lead investor Lightspeed Venture Partners with contributions from Eric Schmidt, French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel, and state-backed investment bank Bpifrance.
The clue as to why the Paris-based startup is now valued at €240 million ($259 million) could be as simple as its name. New AI companies in the US inhaled as much as $25 billion from venture capitalists in the first three months of 2023, and with the artificial intelligence bubble centered on the States, Europe has yet to respond in kind.
There is also the small matter of personnel. Mistral AI chief exec Arthur Mensch used to be a researcher with Google DeepMind and founded the new company with Meta alumni Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample.
Presumably these credentials, combined with the promise of a homegrown European AI, are all it takes for investors to part with millions these days.
Lightspeed partner Antoine Moyroud sure seems to think so. He told the Financial Times “There’s a pool of 80 to 100 people globally who have the level of experience they have. Right now, for better or for worse, the capital requirements in compute and top-tier talent make [launching an AI startup] quite a capital-intensive game.
