Another busy day when it comes to big raises in the world of AI.
Paris-based Mistral AI finally secured its much talked about round that values the OpenAI and Anthropic competitor at $6 billion, per a report in the Financial Times. According to the report, Mistral AI raised $500 million in equity and $140 million in debt.
The round was led by General Catalyst and includes a long list of investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment, Salesforce Ventures 1, Belfius, Bertelsmann Investment, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Cisco, Eurazeo, Headline, Hanwha Asset Management’s venture fund, IBM, Korelya Capital, Latitude, Millennium New Horizons, Sanabil Investments, ServiceNow and SV Angel 2.
The new round triples Mistral’s valuation from just last December when it raised approximately $415 million that would value the company at $2 billion, per a Bloomberg report. That round was reportedly led by Andreessen Horowitz and included participation from General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bpifrance.
While the company offers some of its large language models for free, the company charges customers that use an application programming interface to access its proprietary large language models.
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Mistral’s round, however, wasn’t the biggest one of the day.
AI-driven market intelligence platform AlphaSense raised $650 million in funding at a $4 billion valuation co-led by Viking Global Investors and BDT & MSD Partners, and joined by new investors, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Blue Owl and Alkeon Capital, as well as existing investors CapitalG and Goldman Sachs Alternatives.
As part of the deal AlphaSense acquired expert research startup Tegus for approximately $930 million.
Last September, AlphaSense locked up a $150 million Series E led by Bond Capital at a $2.5 billion valuation — an increase of nearly 30% from its $100 million round at a $1.8 billion valuation in April last year.
The New York-based startup’s market intelligence and search platform — powered by AI and natural language processing — helps clients form corporate and investment strategies.
In total, the company has now raised $1.4 billion since its founding.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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