US-based Snowflake has signed a multi-year tech deal with Mistral, the rapidly growing Paris-based artificial intelligence startup.
The agreement comes as Snowflake revealed it is investing an undisclosed amount in the French startup that is not even a year old.
Under the agreement, Snowflake said it plans to bring all open large language models (LLMs) built by Mistral into its data cloud, making them directly available to customers looking to build LLM apps.
Montana-based Snowflake, founded in 2012 and launched in October 2014 after two years in stealth mode, is a relatively large data cloud tester and provider of data cloud computing solutions, serving some of the largest banks and insurance firms across North America.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, the fairly new chief executive of Snowflake, said that “by partnering with Mistral, Snowflake is putting one of the most powerful LLMs on the market directly in the hands of our customers, empowering every user to build cutting-edge, AI-powered apps with simplicity and scale.”
Ramaswamy said his working to “transform how enterprises harness the power of LLMs through Snowflake Cortex so they can cost-effectively address new AI use cases within the security and privacy boundaries of the Data Cloud.”
Rapid rise
The deal with Snowflake marks the second deal in just as many months for Mistral.
Only last month, Capgemini struck a new partnership with the AI startup in order to accelerate more accessible, versatile and cost-effective generative artificial implementation at scale, the companies explained.
The collaboration between the Paris-based information tech multinational and Mistral, generally considered one of the world’s leading players in artificial intelligence, should allow Capgemini to help its client portfolio of banks, insurers and financial services firms to speed up their generative AI use cases by embedding Mistral’s foundational models into their relatively young AI architecture.
Arthur Mensch, co-founder and the current CEO of Mistral, said that his company “is on a mission to push generative AI forward.”
Mensch stressed that deployment at scale is one of the biggest barriers to the widespread adoption of generative AI.
“It is only through collaboration with like-minded visionaries that we will accelerate the diffusion of this world changing technology,” he noted.
Based in France and with a team of AI scientists primarily across Europe, Mistral AI’s models work to realise customization and are pre-trained for multi-lingual competencies, which is increasingly an important requirement for the global financial services space, particularly since this is a fairly regulated sector.
Mistral was only founded in April of last year by researchers previously employed by Meta and Google DeepMind: Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample. It raised about $415 million in October of last year.
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