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

Re:See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old st... by ToJans on Wednesday June 21, 2023 @09:27AM (#36418160)

Ok, so they're aiming for a more "spray & pray" kind of GTM, challenging the incumbents based on the premise that it'll be EU based.

This basically then boils down to: "ChatGPT got x users in a week, and we want to do the same for EU.", without a clear path to profitability or guarantees.

So it's effectively a humongously risky bet by EU VCs?

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Re:See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old st... by rsynnott on Wednesday June 21, 2023 @10:00AM (#36418566)

> without a clear path to profitability or guarantees.

I mean, ^ describes literally all "AI" VC activity, surely? It is, currently, all speculation.

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Re:See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old st... by whiplash451 on Thursday June 22, 2023 @09:26AM (#36431829)

VCs keep lecturing candidates on making sure that they have paying customers on the radar from day one, so no, that does not look like a reasonable VC bet.

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Re:See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old st... by ReDeiPirati on Wednesday June 21, 2023 @10:03AM (#36418596)

I think that the investors are mainly betting on the team expertise to train models as good as the one of OpenAI but with an open source approach (the main differentiator), which according to the founders would open up a bigger market opportunity for them.

> So it's effectively a humongously risky bet by EU VCs?

isn't it supposed to be VCs job to bet on risk proposition with the hope of a 100x return?

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