Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several basic models, is officially considered one of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company to compete with Openai.
It is reportedly in the process of raising another round that would appreciate it to $ 14 billion, up from approx. $ 6 billion in June 2024. While Mistral Ai describes himself as “the world’s greenest and leading independent AI -Lab”, it’s still not as well known as its biggest competitors.
“Go and download Le Chat, made by Mistral, rather than Chatgpt by Openai – or something else,” said French President Emmanuel Macron in a TV interview ahead of AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025.
What is Mistral Ai?
Mistral AI, which offers Open Source AI models, has collected significant amounts of financing since the establishment in 2023 with the ambition to “put Frontier AI in the hands of everyone.” While this is not a direct jab on Openai, the slogan is intended to highlight the company’s openness versus Openai’s typically closed approach.
Its alternative to chatgpt, chat assistant Le Chat, is available on iOS and Android. It reached 1 million downloads in the two weeks after its mobile release, and even grabbed France’s top location for free downloads on the iOS App Store.
In July 2025, Mistral Updated AI Le-Chat with new features that bring the closer to rival AI-Chatbots in full stack: a new “deep research” mode, native multilingual reasoning and advanced image editing. This update also includes the addition of projects that allow users to group chats, documents and ideas in focused spaces.
From September 2025, Le Chat also has the ability to remember previous conversations with the introduction of memories.
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This comes beyond Mistral AIS package of models that include:
- Mistral Large 2, the primary large language model that replaces Mistral Large.
- Pixtral large, revealed 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 giving efficiency without compromising the performance and best for coding and tribal tasks.
- VOXTRAL, MISTRAL’s first open source AI sound model released in July 2025.
- Devstral, an AI model designed for coding and openly available under an Apache 2.0 license, which means it can be used commercially without limitation.
- Codestral, a former generative AI model for code, but whose license banned commercial applications.
- “Les ministraux,” a family of models optimized for edge units like phones.
- Mistral Saba, focused on Arabic language.
In March 2025, the company introduced Mistral OCR, an OCR recognition (OCR) API that can transform any PDF into a text file to make it easier for AI models to take.
In June 2025, Mistral AI also released a vibe coding client, Mistral Code, to compete with established companies such as Windsurf, Anysphere’s Cursor and GitHub Copilot.
Who are Mistral Ais founders?
Mistral AI’s three founders share a background in AI research at major US tech companies with significant surgery in Paris. CEO Arthur Mensch worked used to work at Google’s Deepmind, while CTO Timothée Lacroix and Chief Scientist Officer Guillaume Lample are former Meta employees.
Co-founding advisers also include Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (also board member) and Charles Gorintin from Health Insurance Start Alan as well as former digital minister Cédric O, who has caused sustained controversy because of his previous role.
Is Mistral AIS models open source?
Not all of them. Mistral AI differentiates its leading models whose weights are not available for commercial purposes, from its free models, which it gives weight access under the Apache 2.0 license.
Free models include research models such as Mistral Nemo, which was built in collaboration with NVIDIA, which opened in July 2024.
How does Mistral Ai make money?
While many of Mistral AIS offers are free or now have free levels, Le Chat has paid levels as well. Introduced in February 2025 is Le Chat’s Pro plan price for $ 14.99 a month.
On the pure B2B page, Mistral AI occupies its leading models through APIs with use-based pricing. Businesses can also licenses these models, and the company probably also generates a significant proportion of its revenue from its strategic partnerships, some of which highlighted during the Paris AI summit.
In general, however, Mistral AI’s revenue is still in the eight-digit range, according to several sources.
What partnerships have Mistral AI closed?
By 2024, Mistral AI entered into an agreement with Microsoft, which included a strategic partnership to distribute its AI models through Microsoft’s Azure platform and an investment of 15 million euros. Britain’s Competition and Market Authority (CMA) quickly concluded that the agreement did not qualify for investigation because of its small size. However, it also triggered some criticism in the EU.
In January 2025, Mistral AI signed an agreement with the Press Agency Agence France Press (AFP) to let Chat Query AFP’s entire text archive dating back to 1983.
Mistral AI also secured strategic partnerships with the Army of France and Job Curveau, Luxembourg, Shipping CMA, German Defense Technical Start -up Helsing, IBM, Orange and Stellantis.
In May 2025, Mistral AI announced that it would participate in the establishment of an AI-Campus in the Paris region, as part of a joint venture with UAE investment company MGX, NVIDIA and France’s state-owned investment bank BPIFRANCE.
In June 2025, it was announced that Mistral beginning by 2026 Mistral launches a European platform dedicated to AI and driven by NVIDIA processors, Mistral Compute. The initiative was hailed as ‘historically’ by Macron, who shared the stage with Mensch and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the Vivatech conference shortly after the announcement.
In July 2025, it announced AI for Citizens, “A collaborative initiative to help states and public institutions strategically utilize AI for their people by transforming public services, catalyzing innovation and ensuring competitiveness.”
What business features have Mistral AI developed?
In May 2025, Mistral Ai Mistral Released Agent’s API released the “Empower Enterprises to use AI in more practical and effective ways,” according to its leader of developer relations, Sophia Yang.
In September 2025, the company revealed a renewed Connectors Directory, showing Le Chat’s integration with approx. 20 Enterprise Tools, including Asana, Atlassian, Box, Google Drive, Note, Zapier, as well as E emails and Calendars; And soon data spots and snowflakes.
How much funding has Mistral AI traveled to date?
From February 2025, Mistral AI traveled approx. 1 billion euros in capital to date, approx. 1.04 billion dollars at the current exchange rate. This includes some debt financing as well as several capital financing rounds that have been raised in close order.
In June 2023, and before it even released its first models, Mistral AI raised a record $ 112 million led led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Sources at the time said the seeds around-Europe’s largest ever-esteemed the then one-month-old startup to $ 260 million.
Other investors in this round of rounds included BPIFRANCE, Eric Schmidt, Exor Ventures, First Minute Capital, Heading, Jcdecaux Holding, La Famiglia, Localglobe, Motier Ventures, Rodolphe Saadé, Sofina and Xavier Niel.
Only six months later, it closed a Serie A of € 385 million ($ 415 million at the time) to a reported valuation of $ 2 billion. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) with the participation of existing Backer Lightspeed as well as GDP Paribas, CMA-CGM, Conviction, Elad Gil, General Catalyst and Salesforce.
The $ 16.3 million convertible investments made by Microsoft in Mistral AI as part of their partnership announced in February 2024, was presented as a Serie A extension, which involves an unchanged valuation.
In June 2024, Mistral AI then raised 600 million. EUR in a mixture of equity and debt (about $ 640 million on the exchange rate at that time). The long rumored round was led by General Catalyst for a $ 6 billion valuation, with remarkable investors including Cisco, IBM, NVIDIA, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation and others.
According to Bloomberg, Mistral AI is now finishing an invest of € 2 billion for a valuation after money of $ 14 billion. This follows earlier reports that the company was in negotiations to raise $ 1 billion in equity from investors, including ABU Dhabis MGX fund, as well as hundreds of millions of euros in debt. But
How does Mistral AI AI AI regulation?
Mensch was part of a group of European CEOs who signed an open letter in July 2025, calling on Brussels to ‘stop the clock’ for two years before the most important obligations in the EU -artic intelligence law come into force. The European Commission sticks to its original timeline.
What could a Mistral AI output look like?
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 considering how much start -up has been raised so far: Even a big sale may not give high enough multiples to its investors, not to mention sovereignty problems depending on the transferee.
However, the only way of definitely squash is sustained acquisition rumors – recently to name Apple – to scale its revenue to levels that even justify its valuation. Either way, stay up to date.
This story was originally published on February 28, 2025 and will be updated regularly.