Slight correction, Mistral.AI was funded by two people from Meta (Guillaume Lample, Timothée Lacroix) and one from Deepmind (Arthur Mensch).

For new technologies, what matters most might be the universities where people are from, rather than the companies. The founders of Google graduated from Stanford. The founders of Mistra AI graduated from École Polytechnique and École Normale Supérieure, that are renowned in France, notably for their scientific formations.

Same as OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Adept and hundreds of other small-mid sized AI startups. When the dust settles and the space gets more mature the exodus from Google Brain/Deepmind over the last few years will be considered this generation's Fairchild moment.