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French AI lab Mistral AI is in early discussions to raise about \u20ac3 billion ($3.5 billion), Bloomberg reported<\/a> Friday, citing anonymous sources.<\/p>\n The funding round would value the company at around \u20ac20 billion (about $23.15 billion), nearly double the \u20ac11.7 billion valuation it received<\/a> in a Series C funding round last September.<\/p>\n One of Europe\u2019s leading AI startups, Mistral launched in 2023 with the stated ambition to \u201cput frontier AI in the hands of everyone.\u201d The company has taken a more open approach to its AI development compared to its American rivals, offering<\/a> some foundational large language models with open weights, allowing anyone to customize them as they see fit.<\/p>\n The company also offers closed models tailored for use cases such as programming, voice cloning and generation, and optical character recognition.<\/p>\n Lately, with European countries distancing<\/a> themselves from American tech, Mistral has positioned<\/a> itself as a friendlier, \u201csovereign\u201d and homegrown alternative. The company is setting up a data center near Paris<\/a> and has partnered with France\u2019s army<\/a>, the government of Luxembourg<\/a>, and several<\/a> major European companies<\/a>.<\/p>\n Still, Mistral has only raised about $4 billion to date, per PitchBook, a fraction of what U.S. rivals OpenAI ($186 billion) and Anthropic ($161.25 billion) have taken in. These labs are also valued much, much higher, reflecting how much further American labs have pulled ahead in revenue, model adoption, and enterprise demand.<\/p>\n Mistral did not immediately return a request for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n