June 11 (Reuters) - French tech company Mistral AI said

on Tuesday it had raised 600 million euros ($643.7 million) in a

funding round led by existing investor General Catalyst.

The Series-B round included investments from firms such as

Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, Cisco Systems ( CSCO ) and

Nvidia ( NVDA ), bringing the AI startup's total funding in the

past one year to more than 1 billion euros.

"This new round puts us in a unique position to push the

frontier of AI and bring state-of-the-art technology to

everyone's hands," co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said.

The adoption of large language models (LLM), which are

trained on large volumes of data and are capable of

understanding and reciprocating in natural language, has become

widespread since the runaway success of OpenAI's ChatGPT

following its launch in late 2021.

Paris-headquartered Mistral, widely considered as OpenAI's

European competitor, said it would use the proceeds to add

computing capacity, recruit workers, and expand its

international presence, particularly in the U.S.

In February, Microsoft ( MSFT ) invested $16 million in

Mistral as part of a partnership to make the company's AI models

available through its Azure cloud computing platform.

The partnership attracted scrutiny from the European Union,

with lawmakers demanding an investigation into what they see as

concentration of power by the tech giant.

($1 = 0.9321 euros)