Mistral AI's $640 million Series B is finally confirmed

Nearly two months ago, reports surfaced that Mistral AI, the Paris-based startup aiming to compete with the biggest players in the artificial intelligence industry, planned to secure up to $600 million in fresh investments at a $6 billion valuation. Those reports floated DST and existing General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners as prospective investors. Indeed, the $640 million Series B was led by General Catalyst, with an impressive list of investors contributing to the round, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, Salesforce Ventures, BNP Paribas, IBM, and SV Angel, among others.

The company stated it plans to purchase additional computing capacity and grow its team in all departments in preparation to expand its distribution channels and strengthen its commercialization strategies to compete with bigger players such as Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI. With $640 million, Mistral AI could afford to buy up to 25,600 Nvidia H100 GPUs at a $25,000 price tag, or 16,000 H200 GPUs at $40,000 per unit. To better understand the dimensions of this investment and what it could unlock, consider that Meta invested around $720 million to buy 24,000 H100 units to train Llama 3.