Move Over, Midas — Brands Seek the Taylor-and-Travis Touch

Amazon Bedrock has announced that it will add Mistral AI models to its lineup, providing customers with even more options for their generative artificial intelligence (AI) needs.

Mistral AI, an AI startup, will soon introduce its foundation models (FMs) to Amazon Bedrock’s existing roster of FMs, Amazon Bedrock said in a Friday (Feb. 23) press release.

The Mistral 8x7B and Mistral 7B models from Mistral AI are designed to excel in tasks such as text summarization, structuration, question answering and code completion, according to the release.

These models have a deep understanding of text structure and architecture, allowing them to extract key ideas from lengthy articles, the release said.

They can also organize information effectively, provide human-like performance in question-answering tasks and perform code-related tasks, per the release.

Their versatility makes Mistral AI’s models valuable for automating and scaling knowledge sharing processes, according to the release.

“No single model is optimized for every use case, and to unlock the value of generative AI, customers need access to a variety of models to discover what works best based on their needs,” the press release said. “That’s why Amazon Bedrock makes it easy to access large language models (LLMs) and other FMs from leading AI companies, including models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI, Amazon — and soon Mistral AI.”

Amazon Bedrock was announced in April 2023 and launched in general availability in September by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is a fully managed service that provides access to FMs from leading AI companies via a single application programming interface (API).

These models can be applied to various use cases, ranging from search and content creation to drug discovery. The service allows customers to experiment with different models and customize them with their own proprietary data, while ensuring privacy and security.

Even before it was made generally available, Amazon Bedrock had been tried by thousands of users, including many whose data was already hosted by Amazon’s cloud division.

“Our mission is to make every company an AI company,” Swami Sivasubramaniam, vice president of database, analytics and machine learning at AWS, said in July.

SumUp is reportedly looking to raise 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) from private credit lenders.

The U.K. payments company would use the money to refinance existing debt, Bloomberg reported Friday (Feb. 23), citing unnamed sources.

SumUp did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

The company’s offerings include point-of-sale (POS) card readers, cash advance through a partnership with VPC in the U.K., and Tap to Pay on iPhone for customers in the U.K., France and the Netherlands.

Friday’s report comes two months after SumUp raised $307 million to expand its footprint and develop new services. The company said at the time that it had operated on a positive EBITDA for a year and was maintaining more than 30% top-line growth.

“This funding gives us additional firepower to pursue growth opportunities and accelerate products that empower small businesses,” SumUp Chief Financial Officer Hermione McKee said at the time.

In August 2023, SumUp raised a $100 million credit facility to launch a merchant financing solution, saying it aimed to provide a lifeline for companies to deal with emergencies or invest in their companies “at a time when businesses are contending with a cost-of-living crisis.”

“Our cash advance product can support business growth in a transparent and fair manner, enabling merchants to continue doing what they do best, without having to worry about accessing funds,” SumUp Co-founder Marc-Alexander Christ said at the time.

SumUp has found success in serving the micro-and-nano merchant segment, where in many cases those companies are run entirely by a sole proprietor, and has been adding POS hardware and issuing to complement its core card reading business, Christ told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview posted in May 2023.

“Merchants are realizing that there is much more technology out there that they can embrace to help them run their businesses,” Christ said.