Mistral AI, a French start-up funded only four weeks ago by a trio of former Meta, Google artificial intelligence researchers has raised an amazing  €105 million in Europe’s largest ever seed round. The Paris-based company is now valued around  €240million including fund raised, highlighting the growing frenzy surrounding AI. Arthur Mensch, CEO of Minstal said ” there is a rising awaremess of the fact that AI is transformative and Europe needs to do something about it, both as a regulator and as a customer and an investor”.

Arthur Mensch, a former DeepMind researcher founded the start-up with Timothee Lacroix and Guillaume Lample who both has left Meta recently, and expertise of the trio catalysed speedy seed funding, as there are only a hundred or so poeple around the world with their experience.

Lightspeed Venture Partners, backer of companies like Snapfhat, Epic Games and Stability AI is leading Mistral’s round, closely followed by other investors like former Google chief Eric Schmidt, French Telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel and Bpifrance, the French state-backed investment bank,

Mistral whose first few employees started only days ago has yet to develop its first product, but plans to launch early next year a new “larg language model”.