Mistral AI, a French firm behind the AI chatbot Le Chat and a number of core large language models, is widely regarded as one of the most promising tech startups in France, and is arguably the only European contender on par with OpenAI.
“Go and get Le Chat, developed by Mistral, instead of ChatGPT by OpenAI — or any other option,” President Emmanuel Macron urged during a television interview before the AI Action Summit in Paris scheduled for February 2025.
After being valued at $6 billion in June 2024, Mistral’s worth has now soared to €11.7 billion (around $13.8 billion) following a Series C investment round led by Dutch semiconductor giant ASML, which contributed €1.3 billion (about $1.5 billion) in September, alongside forming a new strategic alliance with the AI company.
ASML’s aim to extend the benefits of this partnership to its customers marks a pivotal achievement for Mistral. While Mistral touts itself as “the world’s greenest and leading independent AI lab,” its brand recognition still lags behind its major rivals.
What is Mistral AI?
Founded in 2023, Mistral AI offers several open-source AI models and has secured considerable funding, driven by its mission to “put frontier AI in the hands of everyone.” While not a direct critique of OpenAI, this slogan underscores Mistral’s commitment to openness, contrasting with OpenAI’s more closed development approach.
Le Chat, Mistral’s chatbot, is available for both iOS and Android. It reached 1 million downloads within two weeks of launching on mobile, topping the iOS App Store’s free downloads chart in France.
In July 2025, Le Chat was enhanced with features narrowing the gap with comprehensive AI chatbots: a new “deep research” function, built-in multilingual capabilities, and sophisticated image editing. The update also introduced Projects, enabling users to organize conversations, files, and ideas into dedicated workspaces.
By September 2025, Le Chat gained the ability to recall previous chats through a feature named Memories.
These developments add to Mistral AI’s full suite of models:
- Mistral Large 2 , the company’s flagship language model, which supersedes Mistral Large .
- Pixtral Large , introduced in 2024 as the latest member of the Pixtral line of multimodal models .
- Magistral , the inaugural series of reasoning models, launched in June 2025.
- Mistral Medium 3 , released in May 2025, is designed to deliver high efficiency and performance, especially for coding and STEM applications.
- Voxtral , Mistral’s first open-source audio AI model, released in July 2025.
- Devstral , their AI model tailored for coding, is openly licensed under Apache 2.0, making it suitable for commercial use without limitations.
- In July 2025, Mistral AI and All Hands AI released Devstral Medium and updated Devstral Small, emphasizing enhanced coding features.
- Devstral is one of four models driving the Mistral Code coding assistant.
- Codestral , an earlier generative coding model, which had restrictions against commercial use in its license.
- “Les Ministraux,” a lineup of models optimized for edge computing on devices like smartphones.
- Mistral Saba, which is centered on Arabic language AI .
In March 2025, Mistral AI launched Mistral OCR, an optical character recognition API that converts PDFs into text files for easier AI processing.
June 2025 saw the debut of Mistral Code, the company’s coding client, positioned as a competitor to tools like Windsurf, Anysphere’s Cursor, and GitHub Copilot.
Who are Mistral AI’s founders?
The three co-founders of Mistral AI all have backgrounds in AI research at leading U.S. tech companies with a presence in Paris. CEO Arthur Mensch previously worked for Google’s DeepMind, while CTO Timothée Lacroix and Chief Scientist Guillaume Lample are former Meta employees.
Advisers who helped establish Mistral include Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (also a board member) and Charles Gorintin from Alan, a health insurance startup. The company also counts former digital minister Cédric O as an adviser, a fact that has sparked ongoing debate due to his prior government role.
Are Mistral’s models open source?
Not all models are open source . Mistral distinguishes its flagship models, whose weights are not publicly available for commercial use, from its freely accessible models released under the Apache 2.0 license.
Research models such as Mistral NeMo, developed with Nvidia and open sourced in July 2024, are among the free offerings.
How does Mistral make money?
While many Mistral AI products are free or have free options, Le Chat also provides paid subscriptions. Launched in February 2025, the Le Chat Pro plan is priced at $14.99 per month.
For business customers, Mistral AI earns revenue from API usage of its top-tier models and through licensing agreements. Strategic partnerships, some highlighted at the Paris AI Summit, are also likely to be a significant revenue source.
Overall, Mistral AI’s reported revenue is in the tens of millions of dollars, based on multiple sources.
What partnerships has Mistral AI closed?
In 2024, Mistral AI entered into a partnership with Microsoft, which included a €15 million investment and a deal to distribute Mistral’s AI models via Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) quickly determined the deal was too minor to warrant an investigation, though it drew some criticism within the EU.
In January 2025, Mistral secured an agreement with Agence France-Presse (AFP), granting Le Chat access to AFP’s entire text archive going back to 1983.
Mistral AI has also formed key partnerships with France’s military and job agency, Luxembourg, shipping giant CMA, German defense tech startup Helsing, IBM, Orange, and Stellantis.
In May 2025, Mistral announced its participation in launching an AI Campus in the Paris area, a joint initiative with UAE’s MGX investment fund, NVIDIA, and France’s state-owned investment bank Bpifrance.
In June 2025, Mistral revealed plans to introduce Mistral Compute, a European AI platform powered by Nvidia chips, in 2026. President Macron, who called the project “historic,” appeared onstage with Mensch and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the VivaTech conference following the announcement.
July 2025 saw the launch of AI for Citizens, a project intended to help governments and public entities leverage AI to modernize public services, according to Mistral.
In September 2025, Mistral and ASML entered into a partnership to explore the application of AI models within ASML’s product offerings, as well as research and operational functions.
What enterprise features has Mistral AI developed?
In May 2025, Mistral AI introduced the Mistral Agents API, which, in the words of Head of Developer Relations Sophia Yang, is designed to “enable businesses to utilize AI in more impactful and practical ways.”
In September 2025, a refreshed Connectors directory was launched, highlighting Le Chat’s integrations with roughly 20 enterprise solutions, such as Asana, Atlassian, Box, Google Drive, Notion, and Zapier, along with email and calendar support; integrations with Databricks and Snowflake are forthcoming.
How much funding has Mistral AI raised to date?
By February 2025, Mistral AI had raised about €1 billion in total, including some debt financing, across several rapidly executed equity rounds.
In June 2023, just a month after its founding, Mistral AI completed a record-setting $112 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which valued the company at $260 million—a new European benchmark at the time.
Other early investors included Bpifrance, Eric Schmidt, Exor Ventures, First Minute Capital, Headline, JCDecaux Holding, La Famiglia, LocalGlobe, Motier Ventures, Rodolphe Saadé, Sofina, and Xavier Niel.
Six months later, Mistral closed a €385 million Series A ($415 million at the time), reportedly at a $2 billion valuation. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with participation from Lightspeed, BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, Conviction, Elad Gil, General Catalyst, and Salesforce.
Microsoft’s $16.3 million convertible investment, announced in February 2024 as an extension of Series A, left the company’s valuation unchanged.
In June 2024, Mistral raised €600 million (around $640 million) through a combination of equity and debt funding. General Catalyst led the much-anticipated round, valuing the company at $6 billion, with notable investors including Cisco, IBM, Nvidia, and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation joining in.
Earlier in the year, reports indicated Mistral AI was close to finalizing a €2 billion investment at a post-money valuation of $14 billion, following previous talks to raise $1 billion in equity from Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund and additional debt financing worth several hundred million euros.
On September 9, 2025, Mistral secured €1.7 billion (about $2 billion) in Series C funding led by ASML, which raised the company’s valuation to €11.7 billion (roughly $13.8 billion). Existing investors DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, and NVIDIA also participated, according to the company.
How is Mistral AI approaching AI regulation?
In July 2025, CEO Arthur Mensch joined other European executives in signing an open letter asking the EU to delay implementation of key parts of the Artificial Intelligence Act for two years. The European Commission, however, intends to stick with its planned timeline .
What could a Mistral AI exit look like?
“Mistral is not up for sale,” Mensch stated at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2025. “Naturally, an IPO is the goal.”
Given the substantial capital Mistral AI has raised, this approach makes sense: even a large-scale acquisition might not deliver sufficient returns for investors, and there are also sovereignty considerations depending on who the buyer might be.
Still, the only surefire way to put persistent acquisition rumors—most recently involving Apple—to rest is to grow revenue to a point that justifies the current valuation. In any case, more developments are likely ahead.
This article was first published on February 28, 2025, and will be updated as new information emerges.
