Europe’s answer to OpenAI is French, 4 weeks old and raised $113 million with a website with less than 40 words
A historic moment for a European startup, a user-friendly crypto wallet, Apple’s revolutionary interface, BlackRock in Bitcoin and a deeper understanding of Nvidia.
It was a historic investment round: never before has a European company raised so much money in a first round of investment. Just four weeks (not years) young Mistral AI raised $113 million this week from a group of investors from Europe and the US. Following this investment, Mistral.ai is worth as much as $260 million, although the former investor in me fears that the founders sold a bit too much of their shares in this first round, selling over 40%.
The co-founder and CEO of Mistral.ai is named Arthur Mensch, who according to his Linkedin profile has 3 years of work experience and, always nice to take a look at, 0 photos and 64 followers on Instagram. The other founders are Timothée Lacroix (CTO) and Guillaume Lample (Chief Scientist). They are all early thirty-somethings and knew each other from college. Mensch worked at Google Deepmind and Lacroix and Lample are ex-Meta employees.
You have to love people with names like that! This is the level of Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan, because oui oui, Timothée, Guillaume and Arthur are modern…
