Mistral AI, the French company behind the AI assistant Le Chat and several fundamental models, is officially considered to be one of the most promising technological startups in France and is undoubtedly the only European company that could compete with Openai. But compared to its valuation of $ 6 billion, its global market share is still relatively low.
However, the recent launch of its chat assistant in mobile application stores was encountered with media threshing, especially in its country of origin. “Go download the cat, which is done by Mistral, rather than by Chatgpt by Openai – or something else,” said French president Emmanuel Macron in a television interview before the AI action summit in Paris in February 2025.
Although this wave of attention can be encouraging, Mistral IA is always confronted with challenges in competition with OpenAi – and in so doing while following its self -define as “the greenest and larger independent AI laboratory”.
What is Mistral Ai?
Mistral IA has collected major funding amounts since its creation in 2023 with the ambition to “put border AI in the hands of all”. Although this is not a direct blow to Openai, the slogan is supposed to highlight the advocacy of the company for the opening in AI.
Its chatgpt alternative, the cat’s cat assistant, is now also available on iOS and Android. It reached 1 million downloads within two weeks of its mobile release, even by entering first place in France for free downloads on the iOS App Store.
In July 2025, Mistral AI has updated the cat with new features that bring it closer to the rival complex chatbots: a new “deep research” mode, a native multilingual reasoning and an advanced image assembly. This update also includes the addition of projects, which allows users of groups, documents and ideas in targeted spaces.
This is added following models of Mistral AI, which includes:
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- Mistral Large 2, the large primary language model replacing Mistral Grand.
- Large pixtral, unveiled in 2024 as a new addition to the Pixter family of multimodal models.
- The masterful, his first family of reasoning models, was launched in June 2025.
- Mistral Medium 3, released in May 2025 with the promise to provide efficiency without compromising performance, and better for coding and STEM tasks.
- Voxtral, the first audio model of Open Source de Mistral, released in July 2025.
- Devstral, an AI model designed for coding and openly available under a Apache 2.0 license, which means that it can be used commercially without restriction.
- Codestral, an earlier generative model for the code, but whose license has prohibited commercial applications.
- “The Minister”, a family of models optimized for on -board devices such as phones.
- Mistral Saba, focused on the Arabic language.
In March 2025, the company introduced Mistral OCR, an optical character recognition API (OCR) which can transform any PDF into a text file to facilitate the ingestion of AI models.
In May 2025, he released the API Mistral Agents to “allow companies to use AI in a more practical and impactful way”, according to his head of relations with developers, Sophia Yang.
In June 2025, Mistral AI also published an atmosphere coding client, Mistral Code, to compete with holders such as Windsurf, the Anysphere cursor and the Github co -pilot.
Who are the founders of Mistral AI?
The three founders of Mistral AI share research training on AI in large American technological companies with important operations in Paris. CEO Arthur Mensch worked at Google Deepmind, while CTO Timothee Lacroix and chief scientist Guillaume Lample are former Meta staff.
Co-founding advisers also include Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (also a member of the board of directors) and Charles Gorinttin of the Health Insurance Startup Alan, as well as the former Minister of Digital Cédric O, who caused persistent controversy because of his previous role.
Are the Mistral AI models open source?
Not all. Mistral AI differentiates its main models, the weights of which are not available for commercial purposes, from its free models, for which it provides weight access under the Apache 2.0 license.
Free models include research models such as Mistral Nemo, which was built in collaboration with Nvidia that the open startup opened in July 2024.
How does Mistral Ia earn money?
While many Mistral AI offers are free or now have free levels, Mistral AI plans to generate income from Le Cat paid levels. Presented in February 2025, the Pro Plan of Le Chat is at a price of $ 14.99 per month.
On the purely B2B side, Mistral has monetized its first models via APIs with prices based on use. Companies can also concede to these models, and the company probably also generates a significant part of its income from its strategic partnerships, some of which highlighted during the Paris IA summit.
Overall, however, Mistral AI’s revenues would still be in the eight -digit range, according to several sources.
What mistral partnerships has it closed?
In 2024, Mistral IA concluded an agreement with Microsoft which included a strategic partnership for the distribution of its AI models via the Azure platform of Microsoft and an investment of 15 million euros. The British Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) quickly concluded that the agreement was not eligible for the investigation because of its small size. However, this also aroused criticism in the EU.
In January 2025, Mistral AI signed an agreement with the Agency Agency France-Presse (AFP) press agency to let the cat question all the AFP text archives dating from 1983.
Mistral IA has also obtained strategic partnerships with the army and the French employment agency, Luxembourg, the maritime transport giant CMA, the 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 the water investment company MGX, NVIDIA and the State Investment Bank of France.
In June 2025, it was announced that from 2026, Mistral will launch a European platform dedicated to AI and propelled by the Nvidia, Mistral Calculation processors. The initiative was praised as “historic” by Macron, who shared the scene with Mensch and the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, during the Vivatech conference shortly after the announcement.
In July 2025, he announced AI for citizens, “a collaborative initiative to help states and public institutions strategically exploit the AI of their people by transforming public services, by catalyzing innovation and guaranteeing competitiveness”.
How much funding has it collected Mistral to date?
In February 2025, Mistral AI raised around 1 billion euros in capital to date, around $ 1.04 billion at the current exchange rate. This includes debt financing, as well as several financing cycles in actions raised in close inheritance.
In June 2023, and even before publishing its first models, Mistral AI raised a record of $ 112 million in seeds led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Sources at the time indicated that the seed round – the largest in Europe has ever evaluated the startup then a month at 260 million dollars.
Other investors in this seed tour 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, he closed a series A of 385 million euros ($ 415 million at the time), with a declared assessment of $ 2 billion. The Tour was led by Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z), with the participation of an existing Backer Stuepeed, as well as BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, Conviction, Elad Gil, General Catalyst and Salesforce.
The convertible investment of $ 16.3 million that Microsoft made in Mistral AI as part of their partnership announced in February 2024 was presented as an extension of serial A, involving an unchanged assessment.
In June 2024, Mistral IA then raised 600 million euros in a mixture of equity and debt (around 640 million dollars at the exchange rate at the time). The long -term round was directed by General Catalyst to an assessment of $ 6 billion, with notable investors, notably Cisco, IBM, NVIDIA, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation and others.
The Mistral AI would now be in talks to raise $ 1 billion in equity from investors, including the MGX Fund for Abu Dhabi, has hundreds of millions of euros in debt.
How does Mistral AI approach AI regulation?
Mensch was part of a group of European CEOs who signed an open letter in July 2025 exhorting Brussels to “stop the stopwatch” for two years before the key obligations of the EU artificial intelligence law came into force. The European Commission sticks to its original calendar.
What could an exit from the Mistral AI?
Mistral is “not for sale,” said Mensch in January 2025 at the Davos World Economic Forum. “Of course, [an IPO is] The plan.
This makes sense, given the amount that the startup has increased so far: even a large sale may not provide multiple sufficiently high to its investors, not to mention the problems of sovereignty depending on the buyer.
However, the only way to definitively crush persistent acquisition rumors – which recently called Apple – is to reduce its income to levels that could even justify its valuation by almost $ 6 billion. Anyway, stay listening.
This story was initially published on February 28, 2025 and will be regularly updated.
