Mistral AI, the French AI nugget co-founded by two X alumni, raised €500 mlns in 2023

Mistral AI, co-founded in February 2023 by Arthur Mensch and Guillaume Lample (both X2011) and Timothée Lacroix (École Normale Supérieure), announced on December 10th that it had raised $385 million, valuing the company at nearly $2 billion, just eight years after its creation. Mistral AI had already raised $105 million at its launch.

It thus becomes the second European AI start-up to have raised as much funds, after Germany's Aleph Alpha, which raised 500 million euros in November.

Trained at École Polytechnique and the École Normale Supérieure, Mistral AI's founders cut their teeth with American tech giants before returning to Paris.

CEO of Mistral AI, Arthur Mensch, 31, spent nearly three years at DeepMind, Google's AI laboratory. Guillaume Lample, Mistral's scientific director, is one of the creators of the LLaMA language model unveiled by Meta, Facebook's parent company, in February. Timothée Lacroix, technical director of Mistral AI, was a researcher at Meta.

The announcement of Mistral AI's second round of financing came the two days after the European Union states reached agreement on the first-ever regulation of the use of artificial intelligence. France and Germany have been pushing hard to ensure that the EU's desire to regulate artificial intelligence systems too quickly does not hinder the initiatives of young European companies in the sector.