A.I. company raises record $113 million just a month after being founded—despite having no product and only just hiring staff

A.I. has fast become the business buzzword of the moment, with major players like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft investing billions as they race to develop the hottest artificial intelligence technology.
For one European company, the A.I. hype helped its founders raise a record 105 million euros ($113.5 million) in its seed round this week—just one month after the company was launched.
Mistral’s seed round—a term referring to a company’s first official equity funding—was the biggest ever recorded in Europe, according to data from Dealroom.co, which tracks private investments in startups.
The company’s success in raising money from investors came despite the firm having yet to develop its first product, and its first employees having started their jobs at Mistral just days ago, the Financial Times reported.

According to the FT, Mistral is planning to launch a large language model in early 2024 that will be similar to the generative A.I. technology underpinning OpenAI’s chatbot phenomenon, ChatGPT.
The firm is still hiring, according to LinkedIn. In a recent job ad, Mistral described itself as “an ambitious company operating in the space of generative artificial intelligence” and said its team is currently made up of 12 people.