French company Mistral AI, last valued at $13.8 billion, has made its first acquisition. OpenAI’s competitors have agreed to acquire Koyeb, a Paris-based startup that simplifies the deployment of large-scale AI apps and manages the infrastructure behind them.
Mistral is primarily known for developing large-scale language models (LLMs), but this deal confirms its ambitions to position itself as a full-stack player. The company announced its AI cloud infrastructure product, Mistral Compute, in June 2025, and expects Koyeb to accelerate this.
Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb aimed to enable developers to process data without worrying about server infrastructure (a concept known as serverless). This approach has gained relevance as AI becomes more demanding, and also inspired the recent launch of Koyeb Sandboxes, which provide an isolated environment for deploying AI agents.
Prior to the acquisition, Koyeb’s platform was already helping users deploy models such as Mistral. Koyev said in a blog post that the platform will continue to operate. However, according to Mistral’s press release, its team and technology will now also help Mistral deploy models directly on customers’ own hardware (on-premises), optimize GPU usage, and scale up AI inference (the process of running a trained AI model to generate a response).
As part of the deal, 13 Koyeb employees and co-founders Yann Leger, Edouard Bonlieu and Bastien Chatelard (pictured in 2020) will join Mistral’s engineering team, overseen by CTO and co-founder Timothy Lacroix. Under his leadership, Koyeb expects his platform to become a “core component” of Mistral Compute in the coming months.
“Koyeb’s products and expertise will accelerate development on the computing side and help build a true AI cloud,” Lacroix said in a statement. Mistral is stepping up its cloud ambitions. Just days ago, the company announced a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden as demand for alternatives to U.S. infrastructure grows.
Kojeb has raised $8.6 million to date, including a $1.6 million pre-seed round in 2020 and a $7 million seed round in 2023 led by Paris-based venture capital firm Serena, and company president Florian de Maupe celebrated the acquisition. For the company, the combination will play an important role “in building the foundation for a sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe,” she told TechCrunch.
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Thanks in part to these geopolitical tailwinds, but also due to its focus on helping businesses extract value from AI, Mistral recently passed the $400 million annual recurring revenue milestone. Koyeb also plans to focus on enterprise clients going forward, and new users will no longer be able to sign up for the starter tier.
Mistral did not disclose financial terms of the deal, and it is unclear whether other acquisitions are in the works. But at the Tecarena conference in Stockholm last week, CEO Arthur Mensch said Mistral is recruiting for infrastructure and other roles and is marketing to prospective employees that the company is an organization “headquartered in Europe and doing cutting-edge research in Europe.”
