Mistral AI Raises €105M in Europe’s Biggest Seed Funding Round.

Paris-based start-up Mistral AI has secured €105m in funding in Europe’s largest-ever seed round, just four weeks after its founding. The company, which plans to make AI more useful, was established by a team of AI researchers, including a former DeepMind employee. Mistral AI will now focus on developing its first product: a large language model (LLM) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company will only use publicly available data to avoid potential legal issues and copyright infringement. The aim is to target enterprises rather than consumers, helping clients exploit AI’s potential to improve R&D, customer care, and marketing, in addition to building new products with AI. The funds will be used to rent computer power to train the product. Mistral AI intends to differentiate itself from OpenAI by offering open-sourced models and data sets, while Lightspeed Venture Partners led the funding round, which also had contributions from investors including JCDecaux Holding and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.