Tripling Down on Mistral AI

Today, we are excited to triple down on our partnership with Mistral AI by co-leading their €600M Series B round. Mistral’s astounding impact on the global stage since its inception only a year ago is a true testament to the uniqueness and vitality of Europe in today’s global AI Renaissance. We believe Mistral will be one of the leading generational global technology companies to emerge from France’s vibrant AI ecosystem, and we are energized to help catalyze their Europe-led movement which is accelerating AI product innovation, driving industry transformation and bolstering resilience globally.

Since partnering with Mistral at their inception a year ago, their open source approach to frontier AI has propelled them to the forefront of the world stage with remarkable force. At the heart of this meteoric ascent lies a foundation built upon exceptional European AI talent, a culture of humility, ambition and determination, and deep trust with the AI developer community. Today, Mistral’s industry-leading open models are not only setting the standard across the performance-cost frontier, but also catalyzing AI product innovation and cutting-edge AI safety research on a national, regional, and global scale. We see tremendous value from the rise of such a rich ecosystem already flourishing around Mistral and are eager to support their dream of making France and Europe the center of the global “RenAIssance”.

Now, Mistral is embarking on the next stage of their journey to drive economy-wide transformation. With La Plateforme and Le Chat — whose names exude the elegance emblematic of the company’s French roots — Mistral is empowering enterprise leaders to reinvent their core businesses and enabling entrepreneurs to create entirely new markets. For Europe, we believe Mistral’s frontier AI presents a unique opportunity to leapfrog the traditional SaaS era and firmly capitalize on the continent’s vertical strength. We are fortunate to already partner with a number of AI-first industry platform companies including Adept, Applied Intuition, Crescendo, Helsing, Hippocratic, Grammarly, PhysicsX, and Shift, and look forward to co-creating several more with Mistral in the near future. 

Finally, Mistral’s open, portable platform is proving itself to be a fundamental building block to advancing resilience in AI – for France, Europe, and beyond. At General Catalyst, we recently outlined our thesis for Global Resilience: in today’s new world order, defined by great power competition and re-globalization, we need to build more dynamic, resilient systems across the most critical industries for our economy and our society. We believe this is particularly true in frontier AI, and are thrilled to see Mistral create a leading technology platform that radically collaborates with local ecosystems and provides safety, stability and greater control for enterprise or sovereign benefit.

As investors, consumers, and citizens, it is our privilege to continue supporting Mistral on their mission to advance intelligence and help solve the world’s most complex and pressing problems. We are thrilled  to be part of this daring and category-defining journey with Arthur, Guillaume, Tim, and their team, and invite everyone to build high trust, high integrity applications with Mistral.