The French startup Mistral AI has raised investment funds in the amount of $113 million following the results of the initial round of financing.

The relevant information was published by the media last Tuesday, June 13. This startup was founded by artificial intelligence specialists from Google and Meta. Special attention should be paid to the fact that the company was created only a few weeks ago.

This round of seed funding was the largest among rounds of the same level that have ever been held in Europe. The result in the form of investments in the amount of $ 113 million is a confirmation of the increased interest in artificial intelligence even during the period of reduction in the number of deals.

Arthur Mensch, executive director of Mistral and a former DeepMind researcher, says that an understanding is currently being formed and formulated that AI is a technology with significant transformation potential, and for this reason, Europe should respond as a regulator, as an investor, and as a client.

Media sources associated with the French startup reported that the company’s value is $259 million.

Antoine Moyroud, whose Lightspeed venture partners led the funding round, says that the scale and speed of investing in the firm is an indicator of the high level of qualifications of its founders. He stated that there are no more than 100 people worldwide with the same experience. According to him, at present, capital requirements for computing technology and top-level talents make launching a startup focused on artificial intelligence a capital-intensive game.

Mistral has not created a single product yet. The company’s employees started working just a few days ago. At the beginning of next year, the startup intends to present a new large language model (LLM), which will be similar to OpenAI ChatGPT.

Jason Verlen, senior vice president of product management at CCC Intelligent Solutions, says that the potential of LLM has just begun to unfold. He said that the application of these models can spread on a much larger scale than at present, and open up new use cases in the business sphere, and not just increase the level of productivity.

Jason Verlen stated that the possibilities of artificial to achieve new horizons of efficiency and productiveness in the macro environment are almost incredible. He is enthusiastic about the prospects of AI. According to Jason Verlen, the business world is gradually beginning to move to the next stage after the practice of using artificial intelligence platforms of the first wave, which were previously trained using publicly available data. The second wave, according to his interpretation, provides that organizations use AI based on internal arrays of information to solve narrower tasks.

As we have reported earlier, Synthesia Joins Unicorn Club Amid Flurry of AI Investments.