French AI startup Mistral AI is nearing a financing agreement that values the company at $6 billion, tripling its valuation from six months ago to nearly three times its previous level, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal today.
Mistral AI’s valuation was $2.15 billion in a financing round last December.
General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners are expected to be the major investors in this new funding round, with Mistral aiming to raise about $600 million.
In February, Microsoft invested $16 million in Mistral AI and entered into a collaboration using the Azure cloud computing platform to host its AI models.
Almost simultaneously, Mistral announced the launch of its AI chatbot, Le Chat, seen as a strong competitor to ChatGPT and designed as an “entry point” for users to interact with various models, including Mistral Large, Mistral Small, and Next.
Le Chat offers both free and premium versions, unlike ChatGPT Plus, which has a fixed monthly fee. Instead, it uses a token-based on-demand payment model.
Pricing for Le Chat depends on the selected model, with the most affordable open-mistral-7b model charging $0.25 per million tokens for input and output, while the more powerful mistral-large-2402 model costs $8 per million tokens for input and $24 for output.
In April, Mistral AI launched the Mixtral 8x22B open-source model, which has 176 billion parameters and a context length of 65,000 tokens, available for download via Torrent.
Since its inception, Mistral AI has attracted significant attention, known for its rapid growth and substantial fundraising, further accelerated by Microsoft’s investment.
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