Mistral AI has raised €3 billion ($3.5 billion) in an investment round led by Samsung Electronics, raising the startup's valuation to over €21 billion. The funding will be used to develop new artificial intelligence models and build computing infrastructure.
Mistral AI has raised €3 billion ($3.5 billion) in an investment round led by Samsung Electronics, raising the startup's valuation to over €21 billion. The funding will be used to develop new artificial intelligence models and build computing infrastructure.
The funding round was co-led by European fund Scaleup Europe and PSG Equity, Bloomberg reports . The deal sees the Parisian startup nearly double its previous valuation of €11.7 billion, set when it raised capital a year ago.
According to Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, the raised capital will provide the company with the resources to enter the industrial AI market, in particular to implement the technology in production processes. Despite the fact that Mistral is significantly inferior in size to American giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the company is positioning itself as an independent European alternative. It has already signed partnership agreements with large European concerns, including Airbus, BMW and chip manufacturing equipment manufacturer ASML Holding (the latter led Mistral’s previous investment round).
"This round of financing will also allow us to expand our presence in the US and Asia and, of course, strengthen our position in Europe. Such technology requires significant infrastructure capacity," said Arthur Mensch.
The infrastructure direction involves owning its own data centers. Earlier this year, Mistral raised $830 million in debt financing to build a data center near Paris using Nvidia chips, and also allocated €1.2 billion for a data center in Sweden, the company's first facility outside France.
The partnership with Samsung opens up new opportunities for joint technology development, Mensch stressed. ASML, which also participated in the current round, invested €1.3 billion last year for an 11% stake in Mistral. The then head of ASML, Christophe Fouquet, stated his intention to integrate artificial intelligence into all processes of the organization.
Mistral was founded in 2023 by Arthur Mensch (a former employee of Google's DeepMind) and former Meta researchers Timothy Lacroix and Guillaume Lampl. The company specializes in building large, open-source language models. According to Mensch, open source is more cost-effective and easier to integrate into complex corporate systems compared to the closed systems of American competitors.
Mistral is also counting on support from European governments seeking to reduce their reliance on American and Chinese technology, concerns about such reliance having been heightened after the US administration ordered Anthropic to restrict access to its most advanced models to foreign nationals on national security grounds.
