What is Mistral AI? What is Mistral AI?
Mistral AI, a French company behind AI assistant Le Chat, and several foundational models is officially regarded by the French government as one of Franceās most promising tech startups. It is also arguably the only European firm that can compete with OpenAI. Its global market share, however, is still low compared to its $6 Billion valuation.
The recent launch of its chat assistance on mobile app stores has been met with some hype, especially in its home nation. In a TV interview, French President Emmanuel Macron told viewers to download Le Chat by Mistral instead of ChatGPT, made by OpenAI, or anything else, ahead of the AI Action Summit.
Although this wave of attention is encouraging, Mistral AI faces challenges in competing against the likes OpenAI — while doing so and keeping up with its own self-definition of “the world’s leading independent AI laboratory.”
What is Mistral AI?
Mistral AI, which was founded in 2023, has raised significant funding with the aim of “putting frontier AI in everyone’s hands.” This is not a direct attack on OpenAI but is meant to highlight Mistral AI’s advocacy of openness in AI.
ChatGPT’s alternative, Le Chat, the chat assistant, is now available on iOS and Android. In the two weeks after its mobile release, it reached 1,000,000 downloads. It even grabbed France’s top spot in free downloads for iOS App Store.
Mistral AI’s model suite includes:
- Mistral Large 2 – the primary large language replacement for Mistral Large.
- Pixtral Largewas unveiled in 2024, as a new model to the Pixtral multimodal family.
- Mistral Medium 3 released in May 2025, with the promise to provide efficiency without compromising on performance. It is best for coding and other STEM tasks.
- Devstral is an AI model for coding that is openly available with an Apache 2.0 license. This means it can be used without restriction commercially.
- Codestral was an earlier generative AI code model, but its license prohibited commercial applications.
- Les Ministraux, a family models optimized for edge devices like phones.
- Mistral Saba focuses on Arabic language.
The company introduced Mistral OCR in March 2025. This API can convert any PDF file into a text document to make it easier to ingest by AI models.
Who are the founders of Mistral AI?
The three founders of Mistral AI have a common background in AI research with major U.S. technology companies that have significant operations in Paris. Arthur Mensch, the CEO of Mistral AI, was a former DeepMind employee. CTO Timothee Lacroix is a former Meta employee.
Other co-founding advisors include Jean-Charles SamuelianWerve, Charles Gorintin, and Jean-Charles SamuelianWerve from health insurance startup Alan. Also included are former digital minister CedricO. His previous role has caused controversy.
Are Mistral AI models open source?
Not all of themMistral AI distinguishes its premier models. Weights from its free models are not available for commercial use, as it provides weight access through the Apache 2.0 license.
The free models include research models like Mistral NeMo that was built in collaboration by Nvidia and the startup Open sourced by July 2024.
How does Mistral AI earn money?
Although many Mistral AI offerings are free, or have free tiers now, Mistral AI plans on driving some revenue from Le Chatās paid tiers. Le Chat’s Pro plan, which will be introduced in February 2025 at a monthly price of $14.99, is priced at $14.99.
Mistral AI’s premier models are monetized through APIs and usage-based pricing on the B2B side. Enterprises can license these models and the company is likely to generate a significant portion of its revenue through its strategic partnerships. Some of which were highlighted by the company during the Paris AI Summit.
Mistral AI’s overall revenue, however, is still in the eight digit range, according multiple sources.
What partnerships has Mistral AI closed up?
Mistral AI signed a deal in 2024 with Microsoft, which included a strategic partner for the distribution of its AI models via Microsoft’s Azure platform as well as a EUR15-million investment. The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA’s) quickly concluded that this deal did not qualify for an investigation due to its size. It also sparked some Criticism is a common thing in the EU.
Mistral AI signed a contract with Agence France-Presse in January 2025 to allow Chat to query the AFP text archive going back to 1983.
Mistral AI has also established strategic partnerships with Franceās Army Job agency German defense tech startup and shipping giant CMA Helsing (19459065) IBM Orangeis a color. Stellantis. Mistral AI announced in May 2025 that it would be participating in the creation of An AI Campus is located in the Paris areaas part of a joint-venture with UAE-investment company MGX, NVIDIA and France’s State-owned Investment Bank Bpifrance.
How much money has Mistral AI raised so far?
By February 2025, Mistral AI will have raised approximately EUR1 billion, or $1.04 billion, at the current exchange rates. This includes debt financing as well as several rounds of equity financing raised in rapid succession.
Before Mistral AI released its first models in June 2023, it raised a record $112,000,000 seed round led Lightspeed Venture Partners. Sources at the tme said that the seed round — Europe’s biggest evervalued the one-month-old company at $260 million.
Other participants in this seed round were Bpifrance and Eric Schmidt. Exor Ventures was also involved, as well as First Minute Capital, Headline Capital, JCDecaux Holdings, La Famiglia LocalGlobe Motier Ventures Rodolphe Saade Sofina.
Six months later, the company closed a Series A round of EUR385m ($415m at the time), with a reported valuation at $2 billion. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with participation from Lightspeed, BNP Paribas CMA-CGM Conviction, Elad Gil General Catalyst and Salesforce.
Microsoft’s $16.3 million convertible investment in Mistral AI, made as part of the partnership announced in February 20,24, was presented as a series A extension. This implied that the valuation remained unchanged.
Mistral AI raised EUR600m in June 2024 as a mix between equity and debt. (Around $640m at the time of the exchange rate). General Catalyst led the long-rumored round at a valuation of $6 billion, with notable investors including Cisco, IBM Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation and others.
What would a Mistral AI-based exit look like? Mensch stated in January 2025, at the World Economic Forum of Davos, that Mistral was “not for sale”. “Of Course, [an IPO is] is the plan.”
Given how much Mistral has raised, this makes sense. Even a large transaction may not provide enough multiples to its investors.
But the only way to end persistent acquisition rumors would be to increase its revenue to a level that could even remotely justify it’s valuation of nearly $6 billion. Stay tuned. This story was first published on February 28, 2020 and will be updated regularly
