France's (and Europe's) GenAI darling Mistral has reportedly almost tripled its valuation, reaching €5.8bn.

First reported by Sifted and later confirmed by the Financial Times, the Paris-based startup has raised a €468mn equity funding round, led by DST global and existing investor General Catalyst. An additional €132mn in debt financing brings the total funding to €600mn.

Mistral launched just a little over a year ago, but it has risen to prominence at an impressive rate. Its open-source and optimised multilingual large language models (LLMs), which target developers, have quickly rendered it the European challenger to OpenAI.

The startup's potential attracted strong investor interest from the outset. Last year, Mistral secured €105mn in Europe's reportedly largest ever seed funding round. An additional €385mn round followed in late 2023, bringing the company's valuation to about €2bn.

Since its founding, the French unicorn hasn't only managed to continuously attract investment. It has also released multiple LLMs and struck partnerships with tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon.

Notably, Mistral has ushered in a boom period for French AI. French President Emmanuel Macron recently touted the startup as a potential tech giant that could enable Europe to challenge the dominance of China and the US.

“We need much more European big players, and I think Mistral AI can be one of them,” Macron said in a May interview with CNBC.

At the time of writing Mistral hasn't provided an official statement on the funding round. TNW has reached out to Mistral, DST Global, and General Catalyst for a comment.