Mistral AI

Mistral AI is a French artificial intelligence company founded in 2023 by former DeepMind and Meta researchers including Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothee Lacroix. The company builds open source and commercial foundation models that offer high performance at lower cost than competitors. Mistral 7B became the most downloaded open source AI model of 2023, demonstrating exceptional performance relative to its size. The company also developed Mixtral 8x7B using a mixture of experts architecture that outperforms GPT-3.5 on many benchmarks. Mistral AI has raised over 1.1 billion dollars in funding at a $6 billion valuation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and BNP Paribas. The company is headquartered in Paris with approximately 200 employees and is considered the leading European AI company. Mistral operates a commercial API platform while also releasing many models as open weights, positioning itself as a more open alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic.