Mistral AI, a French company that develops AI chatbots, Le Chats and several basic leading language models, is considered one of France’s most promising high-tech startups and is undoubtedly the only European company that can compete with Openai.
French President Emmanuel Macron said in a television interview ahead of the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025: “Download the Le Chat made by Mistral, not open or anything else.”
A major step up from its $6 billion valuation from its June 2024 valuation, Mistral has now signed a new strategic partnership for AI companies following the Series C funding round led by Dutch semiconductor company ASML, followed by the Series C funding round, which invested 1.3 billion euros (approximately $1.5 billion) in September.
ASML’s interest in clients benefiting from collaboration is a key milestone for Mistral. The French company describes itself as “the most environmentally friendly and independent AI lab in the world,” but still less well-known than its biggest competitors.
What is Mistral AI?
Mistral AI, which offers several open source AI models, has raised a large amount of funding since its inception in 2023 with the ambition to “put frontier AI into everyone’s hands.” While this is not a direct jab at Openai, the slogan aims to highlight the company’s openness and the closed-source take in the development of Openai’s more recent AI models.
Mistral’s Chatbot Le Chat is available on iOS and Android, reaching 1 million downloads two weeks after the mobile release, grabs France’s top spot for free downloads on the iOS App Store.
In July 2025, Mistral AI updated LE chat with a new feature that brings closer to rival full-stack AI chatbots: new “deep search” mode, native multilingual reasoning, advanced image editing. The update also added a project that allows users to group chats, documents and ideas into a centralized space.
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As of September 2025, Le Chat can recall previous conversations thanks to a feature called Memories.
This will be added to the Mistral AI model suite.
Mistral Large 2, a major major language model that replaces Mistral Large. Pixtral Large was announced in 2024 as a new addition to the Pixtral family of multimodal models. Starting in June 2025, Mistral Medium 3, the first family of inference models, was released in May 2025 and is intended for coding and STEM tasks, with a commitment to providing efficiency without compromising performance. Mistral’s first open source AI audio model, Voxtral, was released in July 2025. DevStral is designed for coding and is openly available under the Apache 2.0 license. Codestral, a previous generation AI model of code that licensed banned commercial applications. “Les Ministraux” is a family of models optimized for edge devices such as phones. Mistral Saba is focused on Arabic.
In March 2025, the company introduced Mistral OCR. This is an optical character recognition API that allows you to turn PDFs into text files so that AI models can ingest.
In June 2025, Mistral AI also released Mistral Code, a Vibe Coding client, to compete with Windsurf, Anysphere cursors, and Github Copilot.
Who was the founder of Mistral AI?
The three founders of Mistral AI share a background in AI research at a leading US high-tech company operating in Paris. CEO Arthur Mensch worked for Google’s Deepmind. CTO Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, the best scientist of the best scientist, were former metastaff.
Mistral’s co-founding advisors include Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (a board member) and Charles Gorintin of health insurance startup Alan. Former Digital Minister Cedric O is also an advisor to the company, a fact that sparked lasting controversy due to his previous role.
Is Mistral’s model open source?
Not all of them. Mistral distinguishes premier models whose weights are not available for commercial purposes from free models that offer weights under the Apache 2.0 license.
The free model includes research models such as Mistral Nemo, built in collaboration with Nvidia, which the startup opened in July 2024.
How does Mistral make money?
Many of the Mistral AI offerings are free or have free tiers now, but Le Chat also paid for the stage. The Le Chat Pro subscription, introduced in February 2025, costs $14.99 a month.
On the B2B front, Mistral AI monetizes the premier model through the API with usage-based pricing. Companies can also license these models, and the company may generate a large portion of its revenue from its strategic partnerships, some of which have been highlighted at the Paris AI Summit.
Overall, however, Mistral AI’s revenues are reportedly in the eight-digit range, according to multiple sources.
Which partnerships did Mistral AI close?
In 2024, Mistral AI signed an agreement with Microsoft, including an investment of 15 million euros and a strategic partnership to distribute AI models for French companies through Microsoft’s Azure platform.
The UK’s Competitive Markets Agency (CMA) quickly concluded that, despite its small size, the deal would not be subject to investigation.
In January 2025, Mistral signed a contract with Press Agency Agency France Press (AFP), which allowed him to query the entire AFP text archive dating back to 1983.
Mistral AI has also secured strategic partnerships with the French Army and employment agencies. Luxembourg, shipping giant CMA, German defense technology startup Helsing, IBM, Orange, and Stellantis.
In May 2025, Mistral said he would participate in the creation of an AI campus in the Paris region as part of a joint venture with UAE investment firm MGX, NVIDIA and French state-owned investment bank BPIFRANCE.
In June 2025, Mistral said it would launch a European platform in 2026, powered by Mistral Compute, an AI-only Nvidia processor. The initiative praised the stage as “historic” after its presentation with Mansch and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the Vivatec conference.
In July 2025, Mistral launched AI for citizens. This is an initiative that the company argued that by transforming public services, it can help states and public agencies strategically use AI for its citizens.
In September 2025, Mistral and Chip Company ASML attacked the partnership “to investigate the use and research, development and operations of AI models across ASML’s product portfolio.”
What enterprise features have Mistral AI developed?
In May 2025, Mistral AI released the Mistral Agents API, allowing it to “use AI in a more practical and impactful way,” according to Sophia Yang, Head of Developer Relations.
In September 2025, the company announced its Revamped Connectors directory, showing the integration of Le Chat with around 20 enterprise tools, including Asana, Atlassian, Box, Google Drive, Concepts, and Zapier. And soon, Databricks and Snowflake.
How much funding has Mistral AI raised so far?
By February 2025, Mistral AI had raised a total of around 1 billion euros, part of which was debt financing. The money was raised in several closely-consecutive stock rounds.
In June 2023, just a month after its founding, Mistral AI raised a record $112 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Sources at the time said Europe’s largest seed round valued the startup at $260 million.
Other investors in that round include Bpifrance, Eric Schmidt, Exor Ventures, First Dishing Capital, Headline, Jcdecaux Holding, La Famiglia, Localglobe, Motier Ventures, Rodolphe Saadé, Sofina and Xavier Niel.
Six months later, Mistral closed its 385 million euro Series A ($415 million at the time) and was reported at a reported $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and saw participation from Lightspeed, and participation from BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, Conviction, Elad Gil, General Catalyst and Salesforce.
The $16.3 million convertible investment in Mistral as part of the partnership announced in February 2024 was presented as a Series A expansion, implying an unchanged valuation.
In June 2024, Mistral raised 600 million euros (approximately $640 million) through a mix of stock and debt. The long-term round was led by General Catalyst at a $6 billion valuation, with prominent investors including Cisco, IBM, Nvidia and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation.
Earlier this year, Mistral AI was rumored to finalise its 2 billion euro investment with a $14 billion money post valuation. This was followed by reports that the company was in talks to raise $1 billion in equity from investors including Abu Dhabi’s MGX Fund and investors including liabilities of hundreds of millions of euros.
On September 9, 2025, Mistral closed its ASML-led Euro 1.7 billion (approximately $2 billion) Series C round at a valuation of 11.7 billion euros (approximately $13.8 billion). According to the company, the round saw investments from existing backers DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Lightspeed and Nvidia.
How is Mistral AI approaching AI regulations?
Mensch was part of a group of European CEOs who signed an open letter in July 2025 urging Brussels to “stop the clock” for two years before the important obligations of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act came into effect. The European Commission is stuck to the original timeline.
What does the Mistral AI exit look like?
Mistral “is not on sale,” Mensch told Davos’ World Economic Forum in January 2025. “Of course (the IPO) is a plan.”
This makes sense given how much the startups have raised so far. Even large sales may not provide sufficient multiples for investors, let alone sovereign concerns depending on the acquirer.
However, the only way to ensure that the rumours of a constant acquisition (which has been named Apple recently) are to expand its revenue to a level where it can even justify its valuation remotely. Either way, look forward to it.
This story was originally released on February 28th, 2025 and will be updated regularly.
