Paris-based AI darling Mistral has closed a €468m equity funding round at a €5.8bn valuation, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the deal.

The fundraise was led by new investor DST Global and existing backer General Catalyst, according to the sources. 

Two sources say that the total size of the raise including debt is €600m.

Mistral and DST Global did not confirm whether or not DST Global participated in the round. 

Existing global investors Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz also invested in the round, along with French banks Bpifrance and BNP Paribas, VC firm Headline and US cloud company Salesforce’s VC arm Salesforce Ventures.

New investors included a number of large tech companies such as IBM, Nvidia, Cisco, ServiceNow and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. French growth VC Korelya Capital and Korean asset manager Hanwha Asset Management also joined.

With over €1bn secured so far, Mistral is now one of France’s best-funded private tech companies. 

The company, which builds large language models — the same generative AI technology that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT —  launched one year ago with a €105m seed round. This was closely followed by a €385m Series A at the end of 2023, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz.

Founded by DeepMind and Meta alumni, the company has quickly risen to prominence, pitching itself as a European competitor to big US tech companies like OpenAI.

In February it signed a distribution deal with Microsoft which saw the US computing giant take a stake in the French startup. The partnership wasn’t seen positively by all, with critics asking whether Mistral can remain a truly European tech champion if it becomes overly reliant on Big Tech.

Mistral is an industry leader in multilingual AI, with its latest model Mistral Large fluent in five languages: French, English, German, Spanish and Italian. 

The company’s latest fundraise comes after a number of French AI companies made headlines in the past few months for securing large amounts of early-stage funding. Paris-based agentic AI startup H recently raised a €220m seed round, while last year US company Poolside closed $126m before moving its HQ to the French capital.

Update on June 12: This story was updated with additional information made available by Mistral.