Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant LE chat and some basic models, is officially considered one of France’s most promising high-tech startups and is undoubtedly the only European company that can compete with Openai.
It is reportedly in the process of raising another round that values around $14 billion from about $6 billion in June 2024.
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.”
What is Mistral AI?
Mistral AI, a provider of open source AI models, has raised a significant amount since it was created 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 Openai’s usual closed approach.
Chat Assistant Le Chat, an alternative to ChatGpt, is available on iOS and Android. It reached 1 million downloads two weeks after the mobile release, grabbing 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. This update also includes adding projects. This allows users to group chats, documents and ideas into a centralized space.
As of September 2025, Le Chat also has the ability to remember previous conversations with the introduction of memories.
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This includes the following in addition 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. Released in June 2025, the first family of inference models, Mistral Medium 3, released in May 2025, offers efficiency without compromising performance, making it ideal for coding and STEM tasks. 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. This means that it can be used commercially without restrictions. Codestral is a previous generation AI model of code, but the license 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 (OCR) API that allows AI models to turn PDFs into text files to make them easier to ingest.
In June 2025, Mistral AI also released Mistral Code, a Vibe Coding client, to compete with incumbents such as Windsurf, Anysphere’s Cursor and Github Copilot.
Who was the founder of Mistral AI?
The three founders of Mistral AI share a background in AI research at a major US high-tech company operating important businesses in Paris. CEO Arthur Mensch once worked at Google’s Deep Mind, while CTO Timothée Lacroix and top scientist Guillaume Lample were former meta staffers.
Co-founding advisors include Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (a board member) and Charles Gorintin of health insurance startup Alan, and CédricO, the former digital minister who sparked persistent controversy due to his previous role.
Is the Mistral AI model open source?
Not all of them. Mistral AI distinguishes premier models whose weight is not available for commercial purposes, and premier models that offer weight access under an Apache 2.0 license.
The free model includes research models such as Mistral Nemo, built in collaboration with Nvidia, which opened in July 2024 by the startup.
How does Mistral AI 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 Plan, which was introduced in February 2025, costs $14.99 per month.
On the purely B2B side, 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 still 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 a strategic partnership to distribute AI models through an investment of 15 million euros with Microsoft’s Azure platform. The UK Competitive Markets Agency (CMA) quickly concluded that the transaction is not eligible for investigation due to its small size. But it also sparked some criticism in the EU.
In January 2025, Mistral AI signed a contract with Press Agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) to query the entire AFP text archive dating back to 1983.
Mistral AI has also secured strategic partnerships with French Army and Employment Agency, Luxembourg, shipping giant CMA, German defense technology startup Helsing, IBM, Orange, and Stellantis.
In May 2025, Mistral AI announced that it 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 investment bank BPIFRANCE.
In June 2025, it was announced that Mistral will launch a European platform exclusively for AI from 2026, and will be equipped with the Nvidia processor Mistral Compute. The initiative was praised by Macron as “historic.” Macron shared the stage with Mensch and nvidia CEO Jensen Fan at the Vivatec Conference shortly after the announcement.
In July 2025, we announced for our citizens the “Cooperative Initiative to Help the State and Public Institutions Strategic Use of AI for People by Transforming Public Services, fostering innovation and ensuring competitiveness.”
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 Le Chat integration with around 20 enterprise tools, including Asana, Atlassian, Box, Google Drive, Notion, Zapier, email and calendars. And soon, Databricks and Snowflake.
How much funding has Mistral AI raised so far?
As of February 2025, Mistral AI had raised about 1 billion euros of capital to date, and about $1.04 billion at its current exchange rate. This includes several debt financing and several closely-sequential equity funding rounds.
In June 2023, and before it released its first model, Mistral AI garnered a record $112 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Sources at the time said the seed round (the largest ever in Europe) valued the then-month startup at $260 million.
Other investors in this seed round include Bpifrance, Eric Schmidt, Exor Ventures, First Minute Capital, Headline, Jcdecaux Holding, La Famiglia, Localglobe, Motier Ventures, Rodolphe Saadé, Sofina and Xavier Niel.
Just six months later, it closed its Series A, which weighed 385 million euros (at that time $415 million) at a reported $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) and was accompanied by participation from existing backers Lightspeed, BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, Conviction, Elad Gil, General Catalyst, and Salesforce.
The $16.3 million conversion investment Microsoft made to Mistral AI as part of the partnership announced in February 2024 is presented as a Series A expansion, meaning an unchanged valuation.
In June 2024, Mistral AI raised €600 million from a mix of stocks and debt (approximately $640 million at the exchange rate at the time). The long-term round was led by General Catalyst at a $6 billion valuation, along with notable investors such as Cisco, IBM, Nvidia and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation.
According to Bloomberg, Mistral AI is currently completing an investment of 2 billion euros with a $14 billion money valuation. This was followed by the company in discussions to raise $1 billion in equity, including hundreds of millions of euros of debt, to raise $1 billion in equity from investors, including Abu Dhabi’s MGX Fund. but
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, [an IPO is] 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.
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