See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old startup Mistral

Reading through the memo, the GTM&#x2F;use cases&#x2F;market seem to be void of any kind of beachhead strategy?<p>I see lots of technical stuff, but the complete business plan &amp; roadmap seems to be lacking any kind of tangible use case that is showing me how they plan to differentiate? (The technical reasons they state seem to be fairy minimal, and I don&#x27;t see anything that competitors couldn&#x27;t do either.)<p>The reason that I&#x27;m weary about this: I&#x27;ve spent a few years in an &quot;innovation division&quot; after customers repeatedly asked for such a service. Turns out the budget for long-running innovation-as-a-service is a hard sell, because in the end someone always has to pay for it, and innovation just for the sake of it gets old really quick. The long term survivors where the ones who continuously innovated for a particular use case - so more on a project basis...<p>So I&#x27;d assume that, just like with blockchain &amp; VR&#x2F;AR, the biggest value will be in very specific use cases in very specific verticals, as opposed to the &quot;spray &amp; pray&quot; approach, offering an &quot;AI as a commodity&quot;.<p>Or is this really just a EU FOMO play, i.e. US is doing it so Europe can&#x27;t stay behind? (Probably hoping for EU funds&#x2F;grants via that &quot;Cedric O&quot; guy.)

For me it is clear that they have given that much money expecting they can get back way more having access to EU bureaucracy.<p>In the EU bureaucracy is huge and they spend billions on taxpayer money. It really doesn&#x27;t matter if those billions are wasted away or not.<p>I have a company and I have to talk with EU politicians, most of them are clueless regarding technology, but they spend billions anyway, so you need to talk with them like they are 10 years old.<p>It seems like they have a guy who is an specialist on just that and knows the right people.

They wield some authority (their respective positions at big AI companies&#x2F;research centers) in the hot topic of the hour and got a lot of money from the usual VC crowd. I don&#x27;t think this &quot;deck&quot; shows how talented or whatever Mistral is, it just shows how stupid the VC space is. Remember, nobody checked the FTX books.<p>The Fed needs to raise rates significantly higher until this stops.

Actually seems pretty strong and I really like that it&#x27;s a memo and not a deck ( I guess that&#x27;s the Amazonian in me speaking). Fundamentally they are aiming for billion dollar valuations and the company and the initial investors want to start strong without the need for subsequent raises anytime soon .... so it might just work out!

It&#x27;s a very impressive memo, but I&#x27;m not sure if I see anything here that&#x27;s replicatable. It&#x27;s clearly a sick team, whom have clients lined up (many of whom probably wont ever engage with an American AI firm until they find ways around Schrems II and, possibly III). Most four-week start ups are not in such a situation.

Mistral is getting a fair amount of bad press and unfair criticism. As an EU citizen, I am glad to see this initiative.<p>I am worried by a couple things, however:<p>- their market is not EU, but France: soon enough, UK and Germany will have their own Mistral. Each will have trivial access to their country&#x27;s market (if only through politic backing) but accessing the neighbor&#x27;s market will be an uphill battle.<p>- they are just helping EU play catch-up, not be at the forefront. Like sama said in a recent tweet: &quot;the most special thing about openai is the culture of repeatable innovation. it is relatively easy to copy something; it’s hard to do something for the first time. it’s really hard to do many things for the first time!&quot; [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;sama&#x2F;status&#x2F;1663983687241744393?s=20" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;sama&#x2F;status&#x2F;1663983687241744393?s=20</a>

I don&#x27;t know, the pitch seemed generic?<p>Seems to me that it&#x27;s the team + market that won the money.

Anyone reached out to them to see what wages they&#x27;re offering?<p>Edit: Trying to see how they will compete with US based on paying EU salaries in a world that is becoming increasingly more remote.

It&#x27;s not the pitch that raised the money, it was the hype around GPT-4, and the realization&#x2F;fear that the EU could miss the next tech boom if they are inattentive.

To me Mistral is a cheap kitchen appliance brand so I looked it up. There’s a <i>lot</i> of brands named Mistral. Soap, windsurfing, apparel, alcohol, footwear, to name the first half of the first page of Google results. We can add AI to the pile. :)<p>I’m not sure I understand the motivation behind picking a well-used name. Is there some strategic advantage to this?

While I fully support a french effort to be competitive in the AI industry, the memo is mostly empty apart for the 1 line bio of the team members that could or could not show the seriousness of the project. I hope that it&#x27;s just the &quot;executive&quot; summary and that there is a real, detailled memo behind the $100 millions and that it&#x27;s not just another &quot;let&#x27;s fund our friends&quot; from the local capitalist class

Memo link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drive.google.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;d&#x2F;1gquqRqiT-2Be85p_5w0izGQGgHvVzncQ&#x2F;view" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drive.google.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;d&#x2F;1gquqRqiT-2Be85p_5w0izGQGgHv...</a><p>&gt; We believe that most of the value in the emerging generative AI market will be located in the hard-to-make technology, i.e. the generative models themselves.<p>This may be true, but it will be a lot easier to target usability and niche use cases than the modeling...

I wonder how much equity is exchanged for that cash.

&gt; OpenAI and its current competitors have embraced a closed technology approach, which will dramatically reduce their market reach.<p>Did it really reduced their market reach?<p>However, for me the key differentiators are:<p>- US is leading, EU is behind.<p>- The team. Very impressive team.

From the founder&#x27;s list:<p>&gt; Cédric O: Former French Secretary of State for Digital Affairs<p>That explains a lot actually, France is the epitome of crony capitalism, and having a former minister (from the current ruling party) is going to help a lot here…

They do have a solid team of founders, that was probably enough to make the pitch

I like that they seem to plan to open source a lot. Lets see.

Who is going to be first to implement real time video analysis of politicians giving speeches and determining the truthfulness of what they say and growing their nose longer the more lies they tell.

Reading that memo is going to be a &quot;hold my beer&quot; moment for many, no doubt.<p>I wonder how much of it was written by ChatGPT...