(BFM Bourse) – The co-founder of the French generative AI start-up Mistral told Bloomberg TV that he was exploring the option of an IPO during the world economic forum in Davos.
Mistral AI, the French start-up specializing in generative artificial intelligence, “is not for sale” and is considering an IPO to maintain its independence, its co-founder Arthur Mensch told Bloomberg TV on Tuesday during the world economic forum. in Davos.
Asked about the possibility of an IPO, the executive replied that “of course, that's the plan”, adding that his company was “not for sale”. “The independence that we enjoy is something that we value very much,” insisted this polytechnic and normalien engineer.
“We left the American tech giants to create a company in Europe to show that Europe has something to say,” said Arthur Mensch, 32, who worked at Google’s artificial intelligence laboratory, DeepMind, before launching Mistral.
A valuation estimated at nearly 6 billion euros
Founded in April 2023 with two former Meta researchers, Mistral has experienced, like its boss, a meteoric rise, completing a funding round of 600 million euros last June with an estimated valuation of nearly 6 billion euros.
In total, the start-up, which presented from its beginnings generative artificial intelligence models capable of competing with those of Meta, Google or even OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, raised more than a billion euros in less than 'one year.
If the company does not need new financing immediately, “we will obviously continue to develop, which would require raising new funds” in the long term, Arthur Mensch told Bloomberg TV.
-“We have a lot of computing power but less than our competitors,” he admitted, adding: “We have still managed to produce excellent models in different sectors.”
Developing artificial intelligence models requires very significant capital.
For example, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, recently concluded a new funding round of 6 billion dollars, while OpenAI, supported in particular by Microsoft, raised 6.6 billion dollars.
Mistral and Agence France-Presse (AFP) signed an agreement in mid-January which allows the start-up's conversational robot to use the agency's news dispatches to respond to requests from its users.
(With AFP)
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