Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one ofFrance’s most promising tech startupsand isarguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI.
It is reportedly in the process of raising another round that wouldvalue it at $14 billion, up from about $6 billion in June, 2024. While Mistral AI describes itself as “the world’s greenest and leading independent AI lab” it is still not as well known as its biggest competitors.
“Go and download Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI — or something else,” French president Emmanuel Macron saidin a TV interviewahead of the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025.
Mistral AI, which offers open-source AI models, has raised significant amounts of funding since its creation in 2023 with the ambition to “put frontier AI in the hands of everyone.” While this isn’t a direct jab at OpenAI, the slogan is meant to highlight the company’s openness versus OpenAI’s typically closed approach.
Its alternative to ChatGPT, chat assistant Le Chat, isavailable on iOS and Android. It reached1 million downloadsin the two weeks following its mobile release, even grabbing France’s top spot for free downloads on the iOS App Store.
In July 2025, Mistral AI updated Le Chat withnew features that bring it closer to rival full-stack AI chatbots: a new “deep research” mode, native multilingual reasoning, and advanced image editing. This update also includes the addition of Projects, which lets users group chats, documents, and ideas into focused spaces.
As of September 2025, Le Chat also has theability to remember previous conversationswith the introduction ofMemories.
This comes in addition to Mistral AI’s suite of models, which includes:
- Mistral Large 2, the primary large language model replacing Mistral Large.
- Pixtral Large, unveiled in 2024 as a new addition to the Pixtral family of multimodal models.
- Magistral, its first family of reasoning models, launched in June 2025.
- Mistral Medium 3, released in May 2025 with the promise of providing efficiency without compromising performance, and best for coding and STEM tasks.
- Voxtral, Mistral’s first open source AI audio model, released in July 2025.
- Devstral, an AI model designed for coding and openly available under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially without restriction. In July 2025, Mistral AI introduced Devstral Medium, as well as an upgrade to Devstral Small, under a collaboration between Mistral AI and All Hands AI that puts emphasis on agentic coding capabilities. Devstral is also one of the four models powering coding assistant Mistral Code.
- In July 2025, Mistral AI introduced Devstral Medium, as well as an upgrade to Devstral Small, under a collaboration between Mistral AI and All Hands AI that puts emphasis on agentic coding capabilities.
- Devstral is also one of the four models powering coding assistant Mistral Code.
- Codestral, an earlier generative AI model for code, but whose license banned commercial applications.
- “Les Ministraux,” a family of models optimized for edge devices such as phones.
- Mistral Saba, focused on Arabic language.
- In July 2025, Mistral AI introduced Devstral Medium, as well as an upgrade to Devstral Small, under a collaboration between Mistral AI and All Hands AI that puts emphasis on agentic coding capabilities.
- Devstral is also one of the four models powering coding assistant Mistral Code.
In March 2025, the companyintroduced Mistral OCR, an optical character recognition (OCR) API that can turn any PDF into a text file to make it easier for AI models to ingest.
In June 2025, Mistral AI also released a vibe coding client,Mistral Code, to compete with incumbents like Windsurf, Anysphere’s Cursor, and GitHub Copilot.
Mistral AI’s three founders share a background in AI research at major U.S. tech companies with significant operations in Paris. CEO Arthur Mensch used to work at Google’s DeepMind, while CTO Timothée Lacroix and chief scientist officer Guillaume Lample are former Meta staffers.
Co-founding advisers also includeJean-Charles Samuelian-Werve(also a board member) and Charles Gorintin from health insurance startup Alan, as well as former digital minister Cédric O, which has causedpersistentcontroversydue to his previous role.
Not all of them. Mistral AI differentiates its premier models, whoseweightsare not available for commercial purposes, from its free models, for which it provides weight access under the Apache 2.0 license.
While many of Mistral AI’s offerings are free ornow have free tiers, Le Chat also has paid tiers. Introduced in February 2025, Le Chat’s Pro plan is priced at $14.99 a month.
On the purely B2B side, Mistral AI monetizes its premier models through APIs with usage-based pricing. Enterprises can also license these models, and the company likely also generates a significant share of its revenue from its strategic partnerships, some of which it highlightedduring the Paris AI Summit.
Overall, however, Mistral AI’s revenue is reportedly still in the eight-digit range, according to multiple sources.
In 2024, Mistral AI entered a deal with Microsoft that included a strategic partnership for distributing its AI models through Microsoft’s Azure platform and a €15 million investment. The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)swiftly concludedthat the deal didn’t qualify for investigation due to its small size. However, it also sparked somecriticismin the EU.
In January 2025, Mistral AIsigned a deal with press agency Agence France-Presse(AFP) to let Chat query the AFP’s entire text archive dating back to 1983.
Mistral AI also secured strategic partnerships with France’sarmyandjob agency,Luxembourg,shipping giant CMA, German defense tech startupHelsing,IBM,Orange, andStellantis.
In May 2025, Mistral AI announced it would participate in the creation ofan AI Campus in the Paris region, as part of a joint venture with UAE-investment firm MGX, NVIDIA, and France’s state-owned investment bankBpifrance.
What enterprise features has Mistral AI developed?
As of February 2025, Mistral AI raised around €1 billion in capital to date, approximately $1.04 billion at the current exchange rate. This includes some debt financing, as well as several equity financing rounds raised in close succession.
In June 2023, and before it even released its first models, Mistral AI raised arecord $112 million seed roundled by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Sources at the time said the seed round —Europe’s largest ever— valued the then-one-month-old startup at $260 million.
Other investors in this seed round included Bpifrance, Eric Schmidt, Exor Ventures, First Minute Capital, Headline, JCDecaux Holding, La Famiglia, LocalGlobe, Motier Ventures, Rodolphe Saadé, Sofina, and Xavier Niel.
Only six months later, it closeda Series A of €385 million($415 million at the time), at a reported valuation of $2 billion. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from existing backer Lightspeed, as well as BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, Conviction, Elad Gil, General Catalyst, and Salesforce.
The$16.3 million convertible investmentthat Microsoft made in Mistral AI as part of their partnership announced in February 2024 was presented as a Series A extension, implying an unchanged valuation.
In June 2024, Mistral AI then raised€600 million in a mix of equity and debt(around $640 million at the exchange rate at the time). Thelong-rumored roundwas led by General Catalyst at a $6 billion valuation, with notable investors, including Cisco, IBM, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, and others.
According to Bloomberg, Mistral AI is nowfinalizing a €2 billion investmentat a post-money valuation of $14 billion. This follows earlier reports that the company wasin talks to raise $1 billionin equity from investors including Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, as well as hundreds of millions of euros in debt. But
Mensch was part of a group of European CEOs whosigned an open letterin July 2025 urging Brussels to‘stop the clock’for two years before key obligations of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act enter into force. The European Commision issticking to its original timeline.
Mistral is “not for sale,”Mensch said in January 2025 at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Of course, [an IPO is] the plan.”
This makes sense, given how much the startup has raised so far: Even a large sale may not provide high enough multiples for its investors, not to mention sovereignty concerns depending on the acquirer.
However, the only way to definitely squash persistent acquisition rumors — latelynaming Apple— is to scale its revenue to levels that could even remotely justify its valuation. Either way, stay tuned.
This story was originally published on February 28, 2025 and will be regularly updated.
Source: Techcrunch
