Abstract:
Led by memory chip giant Samsung, Mistral completed a new round of financing of 3 billion euros. This French AI start-up hopes to build a local AI force in Europe to compete with competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic. This round of investment also saw participation from EQT Management, the EU-backed European Scaling Fund, and existing shareholder PSG Equity. Mistral said that after the completion of this round of financing, the company’s post-money valuation exceeds 21 billion euros.
2025 On June 11, 2020, Mistral AI founder Arthur Mensch attended the NVIDIA GTC conference at the VivaTech technology conference in Paris, France.
Mistral previously completed a round of financing led by Dutch chip equipment manufacturer ASML.
Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said in an interview that the funds will be used to expand computing infrastructure, including building self-built data centers and leasing computing resources to external parties.
“The long-term plan is that we will rely entirely on self-built computing power. In the next five years, our self-owned computing power will grow by approximately 100%.” Mensch said.
The CEO also added that the company will train "larger and faster models."
The Paris-based company develops AI models and deploys AI infrastructure in Sweden. It chose to take a different route from OpenAI and Anthropic: it cooperates with various companies to customize AI tools that suit its own business and complete business system integration.
Mistral has implemented AI technology into the manufacturing process of ASML in the Netherlands. Mensch said that the company will also cooperate with South Korea’s Samsung in similar industrial scenarios.
Mensch predicted earlier this year that Mistral would top $1 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) this year. He said that combined with this round of financing and various cooperation, if the business continues its current growth momentum, actual revenue may exceed the target, but refused to give updated revenue expectations.
“We are very confident that this financing will accelerate business growth in 2027 and beyond.” Mensch told .
Competition from China’s open source model
Mistral is committed to creating an AI alternative that is neither American nor Chinese, in line with the growing demand for sovereign AI (Sovereign AI) in Europe and other regions.
Investors of the European Scaling Fund include the European Commission, as well as large companies such as Novo Holdings and Santander Bank.
Mistral mainly promotes open-weighted AI models, which are different from the proprietary closed-source systems of OpenAI and Anthropic, but it also faces fierce competition from powerful Chinese AI manufacturers.
Mensch said Mistral will release a highly competitive new model "soon."
He mentioned that the Chinese AI lab does not actually serve enterprise customers outside China. Mistral said that Chinese AI models can be deployed on Mistral's infrastructure in some scenarios, but will not form a strong dependence on Chinese AI companies because all relevant data is retained on the Mistral side.
Mensch believes that it is difficult for European companies to rely on Chinese models for a long time. It is impossible to confirm whether these models can be iteratively upgraded in the long term, and it is not certain whether they will encounter export controls in the future.
“The uncertainty in this industry is extremely high right now.” Mensch said.
“We must be a trusted partner to our customers. Customers want us to guarantee that a year from now they will be using a better model than they are using now. The only way to deliver on this promise is for us to continue to train our models autonomously.”
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