Paris-based artificial intelligence company Mistral AI has successfully raised €385 million ($414.41 million) in its second funding round within seven months. The round, led by investors including Andreessen-Horowitz and LightSpeed Ventures, places Mistral AI’s valuation at €2 billion, establishing it as one of the top AI companies globally. Founded by former Meta and Google AI researchers, Mistral AI had previously raised €105 million in June, just a month after its inception.

The company has introduced Mixtral 8x7B, an open model positioned as Europe’s response to AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Set to be operational by early 2024, the Mistral AI platform is currently in beta access. Notably, Mistral AI had been actively involved in advocating for changes to the EU AI Act, receiving support from the French government.

Backed by prominent entities such as Salesforce, BNP Paribas, General Catalyst, and others, Mistral AI aims to achieve frontier-level AI capacities in the coming months. With a focus on developing both developer- and enterprise-oriented products, Mistral AI’s strategic approach involves addressing challenges in computational requirements, data quality, biases, and security.

CEO Arthur Mensch expressed the funding as “another major step in our acceleration.” Mistral AI’s emergence aligns with the EU’s efforts to regulate the AI sector, ensuring future regulations without hindering innovation. With backers like Salesforce and Nvidia, Mistral AI is seen as a potential rival to OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

Mistral AI, with 22 employees, provides open-source language models for companies, competing in a landscape where European AI ventures are gaining prominence. Its unique approach positions it as a contender in the global AI race, impacting various industries, including healthcare, finance, and education.

Mistral AI’s flagship product, Mistral 7B, stands out as a large language model renowned for efficiency and advanced capabilities. Released under the open-source Apache 2.0 license, Mistral 7B showcases innovative training, tuning, and data processing methods. The company’s success and strategic funding position it as a key player in AI, contributing to Europe’s growing stature in the competitive field of artificial intelligence.