firstminute backs Mistral - Europe's next AI pioneer

Firstminute is thrilled to be one of the first backers of Mistral, participating in their €105m seed round in June 2023 led by Lightspeed.

Ever since we first spoke to the team, we have been excited by their clear vision to create a true European and open source challenger to the US generative model builders such as Open AI and Anthropic.

And since we invested they have gone from strength to strength. Just six months after our initial investment, they raised a substantial €385 million Series A, fueling their mission to make state-of-the-art generative models available to businesses and there is more funding to come.

Even more excitedly, they are executing at pace, having already:

• Built a top-tier team from scratch and are actively hiring.

• Released Mistral 7B, a state-of-the-art model that outperforms models twice its size.

• Garnered global interest, with millions of developers downloading and building on their models.

• Released Mixtral 8x7B, which matches or outperforms LLaMa 2 70B and GPT-3.5 on most benchmarks.

• Launched access to their API with three chat endpoints for text generation leveraging the top models of the Mistral family.

An amazing team

When we invested, it was largely about the team. Founded by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix, the company is a remarkable hub of talent coming from Meta’s and Alphabet’s AI research teams.

The trip is part of a new wave of innovators who bring both deep technical knowledge and practical experience from leading AI labs. Arthur's work at DeepMind on projects like Retro, Flamingo, and Chinchilla showcased his expertise in optimizing large language models.

Similarly, Guillaume and Timothée demonstrated their capabilities through the development of LLaMa models, which have gained significant attention in the open-source community.

European open source.

Europe is doing a great job in the latest race to win the Generative AI race. Paris-based Hugging Face is now the world’s largest machine learning model hub. There is also Stability.ai, Synthesia, DeepL as well as companies such as Poolside moving their HQ to Paris.

There is a theme in some of the big companies: open source. Now there is a big debate about whether the future of Generative AI will be open or closed source, mirroring the early iPhone vs Android debate. Now we know what happened there: Android won the biggest market share, but the iPhone captured most of the value (the  iPhone got just 21% market share in terms of shipments, but 50% of revenue and 82% of profits).

Still, we are believers in open source in general (check our our big portfolio with N8N and Element) but also for open source as the future for Generative AI. This is partly because of the speed of iteration and developer adoption. But also because there is so much focus within enterprise is about running on-premises models so that sensitive data does not leave the organisation. This is important to pretty much all big companies - but particularly for areas of government, health, defence and security companies. 

This is one of the reasons we invested in Mistral and are excited about it's future. Europe has a history of creating leading businesses through open-source innovation. Mistral aims to contribute to this legacy by developing a credible open-source alternative in the AI domain, ensuring transparency and addressing enterprise concerns about regulatory compliance.