AI startups apparently are going to end the year the same way they began it — raising huge amounts of cash.
Paris-based Mistral AI, an OpenAI and Anthropic competitor, is putting the final touches on a massive round of approximately $487 million that would value the company at $2 billion, per a Bloomberg report.
The round was first reported in October, with the round being around $300 million.
Per the new report, the round will include approximately $350 million in equity from investors led by Andreessen Horowitz — which is expected to invest more than $200 million. Other investors in the round include General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bpifrance.
In addition, both Nvidia and Salesforce 1agreed to contribute about $130 million in convertible debt to the deal.
The raise comes just about six months after the startup — which is developing an open-source large language model — raised a seed round worth approximately $111 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
More big money
The round is just the latest massive one raised by a competitor of OpenAI, who itself raised the largest U.S.-based startup funding round this year — a $10 billion deal from Microsoft.
San Francisco-based Anthropic raised several rounds throughout the year, totaling more than $2.6 billion, from investors including Amazon and Google.
In June, Palo Alto, California-based Inflection AI locked up a huge $1.3 billion round led by Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and new investor Nvidia, which valued Inflection AI at $4 billion, according to Forbes. The startup is building what it says will be the “largest AI cluster in the world.”
In November, another European startup raised a big sum as Germany-based Aleph Alpha raised a $500 million Series B led by Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence, Bosch Ventures and the companies of Schwarz Group. Founded in 2019, Aleph Alpha allows companies to develop and deploy large language and multimodal models.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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