AI Startup Roundup: OpenAI Rival Mistral AI Set to Raise $485 Million

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Mistral AI

Mistral AI is a French rival to OpenAI that has emerged as one of Europe’s most prominent AI startups. It was founded by former scientists from DeepMind and Meta who worked on large language models.

Latest funding: Set to raise around €450 million ($485 million), according to Bloomberg

Lead investor: Andreesen Horowitz

Other investors: General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bpifrance and others participated in the round. Nvidia and Salesforce contributed €120 million ($129 million) in convertible debt.

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SumUp

SumUp is a London-based card payments startup that competes with Block, the startup co-founded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey that was originally known as square. SumUp’s devices let businesses accept and process card payments.

Latest funding: €285 million ($307 million) as reported by CNBC. It is mostly equity although there is a small amount of debt.

Lead investor: Sixth Street Growth

Other investors: Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, Fin Capital, Liquidity Group

Funding plans: The latest fundraise will give the startup “more firepower to act on opportunities that we see arising over the course of the next two years,” said CFO Hermione McKee.

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ON

Formerly GameOn Technology, the startup now known as ON has built an enterprise-grade conversational AI platform.

Among the organizations using its solutions include retail clients like Valentino and Armani and a slew of sports teams including the New York Yankees, Vegas Raiders and the Houston Rockets.

Latest funding: $25 million

Lead investors: Mirae Asset Venture Investment

Investors: Equiam; B3 Capital; Commonwealth Financial Network

Funding plans: ON told AI Business that the startup plans to use the fresh funds to “expand its horizons into e-commerce, consumer banking, health care, and publishing domains.”

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DataCebo

Boston-based DataCebo offers synthetic data products for enterprises. Its SDV Enterprise product generates high-quality synthetic data for AI developers to use when testing and building generative AI models.

Latest funding: $8.5 million, seed funding

Lead investors: Link Ventures and Zetta Venture Partners

Other investors: Uncorrelated Ventures

Funding plans: DataCebo plans to use the funds to advance its product and to build a go-to-market team.