Mistral AI, a Paris-based artificial intelligence startup, today announced that it has raised €600 million ($640 million) in new funding at a valuation of $6 billion in a round led by General Catalyst.

The funds come from a Series B round after reports last month that the company was seeking $600 million at around a $5 billion valuation. The announcement follows the company’s Series A funding round led by a16z and Lightspeed Ventures six months ago at a $2 billion valuation.

Existing investors joining the round included Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Bpifrance and BNP Paribas. Other corporate backers included big names such as Nvidia Corp., Samsung Venture Investment Corp., Salesforce Ventures LLC and more.

Mistral AI has attracted attention due to the leadership pedigree of its founders who previously worked as researchers at other companies in AI roles. Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample both rose from the ranks of Meta Platforms Inc.’s Paris AI Lab, and Arthur Mensch hails from DeepMind, IBM Corp.’s AI research lab.

Although a relatively new entrant in the AI market, founded in April 2023, Mistral AI is well-known for powerful multilingual AI. Its latest model Mistral Large is fluent in five languages including French, English, German, Spanish and Italian. The company claims that Mistral Large trails the power of OpenAI’s GPT-4 in reasoning benchmarks by only 10%. Mistral also provides two other models, Small and Medium, for tackling different workloads.

The company is up against extremely large players such as Meta Platforms Inc. and OpenAI, which have their own well-positioned large language models, but the investor attention has Mistral Chief Executive Arthur Mensch saying that it’s a very clear signal.

“We were told when we started … that this is a market that is never going to be disrupted,” Mensch told the Financial Times. “We showed that this wasn’t the case and we effectively disrupted the OpenAI business model.”

In February, Mistral inked a distribution partnership deal with Microsoft Corp. giving Mistral’s engineers access to the supercomputing cloud architecture in Azure for training and deploying the company’s AI models. At the same time, Microsoft invested €15 million ($16.3 million) into the company, which will convert into equity in the startup during this funding round.

The company also debuted a powerful open-source coding LLM called Codestral at the end of May capable of understanding more than 80 programming languages. As a 22 billion-parameter LLM, Codestral is lightweight but still capable of standing up against some of the most powerful LLMs on the market, including Meta Platform Inc.’s Llama 3 70B, which weighs in at three times the parameters. It can also process prompts up to 32,000 tokens, more than twice the size supported by Llama 3 70B.

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