Mistral AI

Mistral AI, founded in 2023, is a French company that develops advanced generative AI models. The company focuses on building fast, secure, and open-source language models tailored for business use cases. Mistral AI operates from its headquarters in Paris, France, and has quickly gained attention in the AI industry due to its innovative approach. The company has secured $502.1 million in Series B funding and is valued at over $2 billion.

Mistral AI’s mission is to make advanced AI widely accessible, providing efficient and cost-effective AI solutions for various industries. Their products include Mistral 7B, a language model with 7 billion parameters, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mistral Large 2, which has 123 billion parameters. These models are available either as open-source or through commercial licenses and are optimised for tasks like text generation, summarisation, code completion, and translation. Mistral’s models also support multiple languages and offer function-calling capabilities.

Mistral AI's models are built with security and privacy in mind. They allow businesses to customise AI models for specific needs without compromising data security. The company offers various deployment options, including cloud-based platforms and on-premises installations. Their models are available through platforms like AWS Bedrock, Microsoft Azure, Capgemini, Hugging Face and Google Cloud, making them accessible to a wide range of users.

Mistral AI collaborates with several notable companies, including BNP Paribas, Cloudflare, Zalando, and Gojob, to enhance business operations using AI. The company also supports developers by providing a platform called La Plateforme for building AI applications with ease. Mistral AI’s approach emphasises openness, efficiency, and portability, aiming to make AI accessible and effective for businesses of all sizes.

Mistral AI was founded in April 2023 in Paris, France, by three co-founders: Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix. The company emerged from the experience of these founders, who previously worked at prominent tech companies like Google DeepMind and Meta Platforms. Mistral AI aimed to focus on building open-source generative AI models that are efficient, secure, and tailored for business use cases.

In June 2023, Mistral AI raised its initial funding of €105 million ($117 million) in a Series A round. This investment came from prominent backers, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, and JCDecaux, giving the company a valuation of €240 million ($267 million) at that time. This marked the beginning of its rapid growth in the AI sector, and the company quickly gained attention for its innovative approach to AI model development.

In September 2023, Mistral AI released its first major model, Mistral 7B, under the Apache 2.0 open-source licence. This model had 7 billion parameters and was optimised for tasks like text summarisation, question answering, and code completion. The open-source nature of the model allowed widespread use and customisation.

In December 2023, Mistral AI secured an additional €385 million ($428 million) in a second funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz, BNP Paribas, and Salesforce. This funding pushed the company’s valuation to over €2 billion, positioning it as one of the top AI startups in Europe.

In December 2023, the company also introduced the Mixtral 8x7B model, a sparse mixture of expert models with 8 experts and a total of 46.7 billion parameters. This model outperformed several leading AI models in various benchmarks, demonstrating the efficiency of its architecture.

In early 2024, Mistral AI continued its growth with strategic partnerships. In February 2024, it partnered with Microsoft to integrate its language models into Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. This partnership allowed Mistral’s models to be available to a broader enterprise audience through Azure.

In April 2024, Mistral AI released the Mixtral 8x22B model, which had 22 billion parameters per expert, making it one of the most advanced open-source AI models available. This model was well-received for its performance in multilingual tasks and complex reasoning.

In July 2024, Mistral AI launched the Mistral Large 2 model, with 123 billion parameters and a context length of 128,000 tokens. This model further solidified Mistral’s presence in the AI market, offering high performance in various tasks, including multilingual translation, text summarisation, and coding.

By mid-2024, Mistral AI had secured partnerships with major companies like BNP Paribas, Cloudflare, Zalando, and Synapse Medicine, who leveraged its AI models for various applications such as e-commerce personalisation, customer support automation, and medical recommendations.

As of October 2024, Mistral AI had raised a total of over €600 million ($645 million) in funding, achieving a valuation of €5.8 billion ($6.2 billion). The company remains focused on advancing its AI models and making them accessible to businesses across industries. Mistral AI continues to innovate by offering both open-source and commercial models, ensuring data privacy and security for its users while maintaining a strong presence in the global AI market.

Mistral AI's mission is to create cutting-edge, efficient, and secure generative AI models that can be easily adapted to meet the specific needs of businesses. The company focuses on open-source innovation, ensuring its AI solutions are accessible to a wide range of users. Mistral AI aims to make advanced AI technology available for real-world applications across industries such as finance, healthcare, and e-commerce. By maintaining a commitment to data privacy, security, and transparency, Mistral AI strives to help businesses transform their operations while promoting the portability and customisation of AI models.

Mistral AI envisions a future where AI is a core part of business innovation globally. The company aims to be a leading force in making AI accessible, secure, and customisable for enterprises of all sizes. Mistral AI focuses on developing open-source models that allow businesses to tailor AI to their specific needs while ensuring data privacy and security. Through continuous innovation, the company aspires to support businesses in leveraging AI technology to drive efficiency, improve decision-making, and achieve sustainable growth in various sectors, from healthcare to e-commerce and beyond.

Mistral AI offers a range of advanced AI models designed to cater to various business needs. These models are built to be fast, secure, and efficient, with a focus on open-source technology and customisation. Mistral AI’s products can be used for a variety of tasks, including text generation, summarisation, translation, coding assistance, and more. The company’s models are highly adaptable, allowing businesses to fine-tune them for specific use cases.

• Mistral 7B: Mistral 7B is the company's first major AI model, released in September 2023. It is a dense transformer model with 7 billion parameters. This model is designed for tasks like text summarisation, question answering, text classification, and code completion. Despite its relatively smaller size compared to some competitors, Mistral 7B performs well across multiple benchmarks, offering efficient performance for a wide range of applications. It is available under the Apache 2.0 open-source licence, making it easily accessible to developers and businesses looking to customise it for their own needs.
• Mixtral 8x7B: In December 2023, Mistral AI introduced Mixtral 8x7B, a sparse mixture of experts (SMoE) model. This model has 8 distinct experts, with a total of 46.7 billion parameters, but only 12.9 billion parameters are active per token. This allows the model to be highly efficient in terms of performance and cost. It is particularly useful for multilingual tasks and complex reasoning. Mixtral 8x7B has outperformed several other models in industry-standard benchmarks, showing its capability for a range of AI tasks, including text processing and code generation.
• Mixtral 8x22B: Released in April 2024, Mixtral 8x22B is an upgraded version of the 8x7B model, featuring 22 billion parameters per expert. This model is designed for high-performance tasks and excels in multilingual support and complex problem-solving. It can be used for tasks like large-scale text summarisation, translation, and detailed text analysis. The sparse mixture of experts architecture allows for lower computation costs, making it a strong choice for businesses needing high-efficiency models at scale.
• Mistral Large 2: Mistral Large 2 is the flagship model released in July 2024. It has 123 billion parameters and supports a context length of 128,000 tokens, making it ideal for more complex AI applications that require deep reasoning and large-scale text generation. This model supports many languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Hindi. It is particularly suited for tasks such as multilingual translation, advanced text summarisation, and coding tasks like code generation. Mistral Large 2 is available under both a research licence and a commercial licence.
• Codestral: Codestral, launched in May 2024, is Mistral AI’s first model focused specifically on coding tasks. It supports over 80 programming languages, including Python, Java, C, and PHP, and is optimised for low latency and high performance. Codestral is a smaller model, allowing it to operate efficiently with lower resource requirements. It has a context window of 32,000 tokens and is ideal for businesses needing support for software development, code generation, and IT modernisation.
• Mistral NeMo: Mistral NeMo is a 12-billion-parameter model built in collaboration with NVIDIA. Released under the Apache 2.0 licence, this model is designed to handle advanced AI tasks across multiple languages, including European, Asian, and Middle Eastern languages. Mistral NeMo is particularly useful for enterprises looking for high-speed, multilingual AI capabilities in areas such as translation, text analysis, and customer support automation.

Services: Mistral AI offers services that help businesses customise and fine-tune their models. Through the Mistral Fine-tuning API and open-source fine-tuning code, businesses can adapt Mistral’s models to meet their specific needs. Fine-tuning services allow organisations to build AI solutions that are tailored to their industries, whether it's finance, healthcare, or e-commerce. These services make it easier for companies to use AI efficiently without the need for deep technical expertise