A new artificial intelligence (AI) startup and rival to ChatGPT creator OpenAI has raised $113 million in seed funding, bringing its valuation to $260 million just two months after launching.
The former AI researchers who previously worked at Google DeepMind and Meta co-founded Mistral AI in May 2023 to develop open-source generative AI models. The company's co-founder and CEO, Arthur Mensch, said the Series A funding round “will give us the resources and network we need to start rolling out new generative AI models.” Before co-founding Mistral AI, Mensch was a research scientist at Google Deep Mind. The other two co-founders, Timothee Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, work as research engineers and research scientists at Facebook AI, respectively.
The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from JCDecaux, Rodolphe Saadé, and Motier Ventures, among others. The trio will run the company, based in Paris, and plan to release its first text-based generative AI model in 2024. The company is on a hiring spree, looking for artificial intelligence researchers, software engineers and product developers. The newly formed Mistral AI also doesn't have any social media presence at the time of writing. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and urged South Korea to dominate the manufacturing of chips needed for AI technology.
The chips currently used by OpenAI come from Taiwan, but Altman revealed that in the future, it may need to supply chips from South Korea instead.
