It was a busy day in the world of AI funding, marked by significant financial milestones.
Paris-based Mistral AI has secured a major round of funding, valuing the OpenAI and Anthropic competitor at an impressive $6 billion, as reported by the Financial Times. The company raised $500 million in equity and an additional $140 million in debt. This round was led by General Catalyst and saw participation from a long list of notable investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment, Salesforce Ventures, Belfius, Bertelsmann Investment, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Cisco, Eurazeo, Headline, Hanwha Asset Management’s venture fund, IBM, Korelya Capital, Latitude, Millennium New Horizons, Sanabil Investments, ServiceNow, and SV Angel.
This new funding round has tripled Mistral’s valuation from just last December, when it raised approximately $415 million, bringing its valuation to $2 billion at the time, according to a Bloomberg report. That round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Bpifrance.
Mistral offers some of its large language models for free, but charges customers who use an application programming interface to access its proprietary models.
In other AI news, AlphaSense, an AI-driven market intelligence platform, raised $650 million in funding, bringing its valuation to $4 billion. This round was co-led by Viking Global Investors and BDT & MSD Partners, with new investors J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Blue Owl, and Alkeon Capital joining in, alongside existing investors CapitalG and Goldman Sachs Alternatives.
As part of this deal, AlphaSense acquired expert research startup Tegus for approximately $930 million. Last September, AlphaSense secured $150 million in a Series E round led by Bond Capital at a $2.5 billion valuation, which was a significant increase from its $100 million round at a $1.8 billion valuation in April of the previous year.
The New York-based AlphaSense provides a market intelligence and search platform powered by AI and natural language processing, helping clients develop corporate and investment strategies. Since its founding, the company has raised a total of $1.4 billion.
For more details, see related articles on Mistral AI’s $6 billion valuation and AlphaSense’s recent $2.5 billion valuation milestone.
