French company Mistral AI is officially considered to be one of France's most promising technology startups and is of course the only European company that can compete with OpenaiI. But compared to its $ 6 billion evaluation, its global market share is still relatively low.
However, the recent launch of its chat assistant at the mobile app store was completed with some promotion, especially in our country. French President Emmanuel Macron said in a TV interview ahead of the AI Action Summit in Paris, “Download Le Chat, which is created by Mistral, instead of chat by Openi – or something else,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a TV interview ahead of the AI action summit in Paris.
Although this wave of meditation can be encouraging, Mistral AI is still facing challenges in competition with the choice of openiI-and doing so that it is “the world's most green and major independent AI lab” with its self-language.
What is Mistral AI?
Mistral AI has raised significant amounts of money since its construction in 2023, with the ambition of “Putting Frontier AI in everyone's hands”. Although it is not a direct job in Openai, the slogan means to highlight the advocacy of the company for openness in AI.
Chatgpt, its option of chat Assistant Le Chat, is now available on iOS and Android. It reached 1 million downloads after its mobile release in two weeks, even grabbed the top spot of France for free download on iOS app store.
It comes in addition to the suit of the model of Mistral AI, including:
- Mistral Large 2, Primary Large Language Model In place of Mistral Large.
- The pixetal large, unveiled as a new addition to the Pixetral family of the multimodal model in 2024.
- Mistral Medium 3, was released in May 2025 with a promise to provide efficiency without compromising performance, and the best for coding and stem tasks.
- Devstral, an AI model designed for coding and is openly available under Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially without restrictions.
- Codestral, an earlier liberal AI model for code, but whose license banned commercial applications.
- A family of models adapted to edge devices such as “Lesa Ministry,” phone.
- Mistral Saba focuses on Arabic language.
In March 2025, the company introduced the Mistral OCR, an optical character recognition (OCR) API, which can convert any PDF into text files to make it easier to swallow the AI model.
Who is the founder of Mistral AI?
Three founders of Mistral AI share a background in AI research in major US tech companies with significant operations in Paris. CEO Arthur Mansch worked in Deepmind of Google, while CTO Timothy lacroex and Chief Scientist Officer Guelume Laple are employees of former META.
Co-founder advisors include Jean-Charlas Samuelian-Veer (also a board member) and Charles Gorintin of Health Insurance Startup Allen as well as former Digital Minister Saderic O, which caused a dispute due to his previous role.
Are Mistral AI models open sources?
not all of them. Mistral AI separates its key model, whose weight is not available for commercial purposes, from its free model, for which it provides weight access under Apache 2.0 license.
The free model includes research models such as Mistral Nemo, which was made in collaboration with Nvidia that the startup was open in July 2024.
How does Mistral Ai Earn Money?
While many offerings of Mistral AI are free or now are free tier, Mistral AI plan is to run some revenue from the levels of payment of le chats. Placed in February 2025, the Price of the Pro Plan of Le Chat is $ 14.99 per month.
Purely on the B2B side, Mistral AI mastery its key model via API with use-based pricing. Enterprises can also give licenses to these models, and the possibility of the company also generates an important part of its revenue from its strategic participation, some of which were exposed during the Paris AI Summit.
Overall, however, according to several sources, the revenue of Mistral AI is within the range of eight digits.
Which partnership has Mistral AI shut down?
In 2024, Mistral AI entered a deal with Microsoft, which included a strategic partnership to distribute Microsoft's Azure platform and disburse its AI model through € 15 million investment. The UK competition and the Markets Authority (CMA) rapidly concluded that the deal was not eligible for investigation due to its small size. However, it also criticized some in the European Union.
In January 2025, Mistral AI signed an agreement with the press agency Egnes France-Press (AFP) to allow AFP's entire Text Archive to dating back in 1983.
Mistral AI also achieved strategic partnership with French Army and Job Agency, Shipping Giants CMA, German Defense Tech Startup Helsing, IBM, Orange and Salentis.
In May 2025, Mistral AI announced that it would participate in the construction of an AI campus in the Paris region, as part of a joint venture with the UAE-investment firm MGX, NVDia and French state-owned investment bank BPIFR.
How much funding Mistral AI has done till date?
As of February 2025, Mistral AI increased by about $ 1.04 billion at the current exchange rate, around € 1 billion in the capital to date. It includes some loan financing, as well as several equity financing rounds that have been raised in near succession.
In June 2023, and before it released its first model, Mistral AI set a record of $ 112 million seed round under the leadership of LightSpeed Venture Partners. Sources from that time said that seed-europe gave importance to $ 260 million to the oldest one-month startup ever.
Other investors in this seed round included BPIFRANCE, Eric Schmidt, Exor Ventures, First minute capital, headline, JCDECUX Holding, La Famiglia, Localglobe, Motier Ventures, Rodolphe Saadé, Sofina, and Xavier niel.
Just six months later, it closed a series A in $ 2 billion (at that time) in a $ 2 billion report. The round was led by Andresen Horovitz (A16Z), which included the existing Backer Light Supid, as well as BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, CONG, Elad GIL, General Catalist and Cellsforce participation.
As part of his partnership declared in February 2024, Microsoft by Microsoft presented Microsoft in Mistral AI, presented as a series A Extension, which makes an unchanged evaluation.
In June 2024, Mistral AI then gathered € 600 million in a mixture of equity and loan ($ 640 million at that time) in a mixture of € 600 million. The long -standing rheumatted round was led by General Catalist on an evaluation of $ 6 billion, including Cisco, IBM, NVDia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation and others.
What can a Mistral AI look like getting out?
Mistral “is not for sale,” Mansch said at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2025. “Absolutely, [an IPO is] Plan. ,
This makes sense, given how much the startup has raised so far: even a large sales cannot provide high adequate multiples for their investors, not to mention sovereignty concerns based on the acquisition.
However, certainly the only way to squash rumors of frequent acquisitions is to bring its revenue to those levels that can make its evaluation of approximately $ 6 billion from a distance. Stay in any way.
The story was originally published on February 28, 2025 and will be updated regularly,