A tangential observation: the video on the linked page wasn't what I expected. I thought Mistral was a european AI company, so I didnt expect the video to be filmed in San Francisco featuring three people who don't seem to be european.
I'm not against them being a global organization, that's wonderful. I was just surprised. I expected a parisian office and european accents.
Unfortunately Europeans are terrible customers for making money. They ask a lot of questions and they're very stingy with their wallets. Americans on the other hand ...
This is absolutely not why there are no leading AI, other important silicon tech, or relevant space companies in Europe. To some degree they exist but are all B-Tier in comparison to US/China. You'd be surprised just how lose money can sit in Europe, I guess. Just not the way it needs to be for this.
The financial structure of the EU is nowhere close to enabling these capital devouring endeavors based on lofty future bets. Operating at a loss for years and years is simply unacceptable in European markets and the EU is not authoritarian enough to randomly divert capital based on political orders like China because the EU doesn't try to be a superpower controlling a hemisphere.
>You'd be surprised just how lose money can sit in Europe, I guess
Can you share which are those industries with lose money?
>EU is not authoritarian enough to randomly divert capital based on political orders like China
Except it seems it was authoritarian enough to manage to divert taxpayer funds for refugees, covid, Ukraine, etc in an instant when the shit hit the fan. But somehow for risky but domestic vital industries, that's not possible.
I guess because there's not a well developed kickback industry yet in place for the latter as it is for the former, so politicians handing out the cash to their friends can't grift so easily, yet.
You're american?
He's a prince of whales.
If he's a prince of whales, then I'm the king of eel-gland.
Oh come on!
Mistral has a successful business model and is actually making money. Not sure opening and anthropic are doing that yet.
Another company like this is Blackmagic Design. Despite being overwhelmingly based in Australia, you'd think it was an American company based on office listing ordering on https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/company/offices and /company page.
~Any borderline-large European tech company will have an office on the US west coast, for sales if nothing else. And probably sales engineering. The timezone difference is eight to ten hours; there is really no way around it.
(I did work for one which had an office in Vancouver, instead; same tz.)
Mistral just hired as CMO a Seattle based former Amazon/Google VP¹ , so seems their US based presence is growing.
¹ The one locally famous for being sued by Amazon for non compete back when non compete were a thing: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazon-sues-former-aws-marketi...
And US users spend much more than their EU counterpart
To the best of my knowledge, most of the founding team started their careers in the US ( meta,etc..) and their primary investors are US VCs. In that regard, they smartly benefit on both side : US funding and European brains
Uhm... isnt mistral mostly funded by ASML? A dutch company?
No, it's just one of the investors/customers.
There is even like an american flag flying high in the background