Mistral AI - How is a 4 Week Old Startup Worth $240 Million?!

Plenty of money is being thrown at AI startups as shown by PitchBook data released in March, but last week’s announcement from Mistral AI has blown all those deals out of the water.

Last week French technology and AI company Mistral AI announced that it raised a $113.4 million seed round, just a month after being set up. Sources close to the company that spoke to American tech and portal Techcrunch confirmed that the value of Mistral AI at around $260 million.

Mistral AI is co-founded by alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta and will be focusing on open source solutions and targeting enterprises to create what CEO Arthur Mensch believes is currently the biggest challenge in the field: “To make AI useful.”

So is this $113 million investment into Mistral AI genius, delusional, or stupid?

We discuss this with Kevin Brockland, Founder and Managing Partner of Indelible Ventures - a VC that targets seed stage, tech-enabled B2B startups in the region.

We get into whether this kind of valuation is justified, what VCs consider when they make huge bets like this, how much FOMO factors into a deal like this, the common misconceptions people have about the VC business, and how much a founding team factors into a startups valuation.