AI Startups: Mistral Plans IPO; Harvey Eyes $3 Billion Valuation

Mistral AI, France’s open-source answer to OpenAI, plans to go public instead of being acquired.

“We are not for sale,” CEO and co-founder Arthur Mensch told Bloomberg TV Tuesday (Jan. 21).

There had been speculation that the startup would be acquired by Microsoft, in part due to a partnership and the tech giant’s investment of 15 million euros ($15.6 million) in Mistral. (Microsoft has invested nearly $14 billion in OpenAI.)

As for fundraising efforts, Mensch said in the interview that Mistral is not raising money now, adding the startup has “plenty” of capital. He said the founders left Big Tech in the United States to start the company in Europe to prove the region can challenge the best of Silicon Valley.

Mistral was founded in April 2023 by former engineers from Google DeepMind and Meta. Since then, “the rate of growth has been quite tremendous,” Mensch said in the interview.

The startup is now targeting Asia-Pacific, opening an office in Singapore, Mensch said.

While Mistral offers open-source foundation models, like Meta does, it helps clients customize and deploy them in their organizations.

Mensch revealed in the interview that companies are “a bit struggling” to realize the value of AI and said he believes it will take “decades” to fully roll it out to enterprises.

For now, advancement of AI in the enterprise is “only 5% there,” he said.

Harvey in Talks to Raise $300 Million

Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital is reportedly in discussions to lead a $300 million funding round for legal AI startup Harvey.

The deal would more than double the San Francisco startup’s valuation, to $3 billion, Bloomberg reported. Coatue Management will join the round as a new investor.

Harvey helps lawyers draft contracts; analyze complex datasets, including case law and reference materials; answer questions based on laws, regulations and filings; summarize technical jargon; and conduct research.

Sequoia has backed Google, Apple and OpenAI as startups, although it misstepped by investing in defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

Palantir Could Join Shield AI’s $200 Million Round

Palantir Technologies is in talks to join autonomous drone startup Shield AI’s $200 million funding round, The Information reported.

The round would value the startup at $5 billion. Leading the slew of investors are Airbus, L3Harris Technologies and Lockheed Martin. VC firms joining the round include Andreessen Horowitz, Point72 and Riot Ventures.

Shield AI is the developer of Hivemind, an AI pilot that can enable autonomous swarms of drones and aircraft without GPS, communications or a human pilot. Hivemind is like a human pilot in that it can read and react to a battlefield. It also learns and autonomously executes missions. Hivemind has been in use since 2018.

Healthcare Startup Innovaccer Raises $275 Million

Healthcare startup Innovaccer announced a $275 million Series F funding round, backed by B Capital Group, Banner Health, Danaher Ventures, Generation IM, Kaiser Permanente and M12. Innovaccer said it serves six of the top 10 health systems out of a total of 130 healthcare organizations.

The startup said its goal is to become a one-stop shop for healthcare AI solutions. Innovaccer develops software that powers care programs, modernizes the patient experience and reduces the administrative burden on providers.

Innovaccer plans to use the funding to introduce new AI and cloud capabilities, scale a developer ecosystem on the platform and expand collaboration with clients.

Innovaccer also plans to add multiple copilots and agents to its offerings, which would include solutions for utilization management, prior authorization, clinical decision support, clinical documentation, care management and contact center services.

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