Apple, the Cupertino giant, will seriously consider acquiring the French AI startup Mistral, reported Bloomberg on July 13.
Mistral has raised a total of €1.1 billion (approximately $1.2 billion) over seven funding rounds. Last June, the company raised €600 million (approximately $660 million) in its Series B round, led by DST Global, General Catalyst, among others. Recently, Bloomberg reported that the company is in talks to raise as much as $1 billion from investors.
Besides equity financing, the company is also in talks for ‘hundreds of millions of euros in debt’ from lenders.
Over the years, Mistral has launched a range of large and small language models, achieving notable success with its OCR (optical character recognition) features. Additionally, its chatbot ‘Le Chat’ is known for providing quick responses to users’ queries. It is currently Europe’s biggest AI startup, valued at €5.8 billion (approximately $6.2 billion).
Apple’s development follows previous reports that its executives had held internal talks about acquiring Perplexity, a US-based AI startup. However, Perplexity’s leadership has downplayed the talks, stating they have “no knowledge of any current or future M&A discussions.”
The acquisition of an AI start-up will provide the much-needed boost to Apple’s AI ecosystem, which has faced criticism and user dissatisfaction over the past two years.
Additionally, the company has experienced changes in its talent and leadership. Ruoming Pang, a ‘distinguished engineer’ and the manager of Apple’s foundational models team, recently departed and joined Meta, which reportedly offered him a package worth tens of millions of dollars annually.
Another senior researcher at Apple, Tom Gunter, has also departed from the company. Gunter spent eight years there, and his colleagues consider him “difficult to replace, given his unique skillset.”
Apple has been exploring the use of third-party AI models to improve the latest and upgraded versions of Siri, its virtual assistant on consumer devices, amidst these developments. A new, upgraded version of Siri is something that the company has struggled with, and its release has been delayed until 2026.
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