Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of France’s most promising tech startups, with arguable status as perhaps the only European alternative to OpenAI. However small, its global market share remains far behind that eye-catching $6 billion valuation.
In France, there had been great excitement over the recent release of its chat assistant on mobile app stores. “Go out and download Le Chat, from Mistral instead of ChatGPT from OpenAI, or something else,” French President Emmanuel Macron told a TV interview before the AI Action Summit in Paris.
This media attention has actually bettered Mistral AI’s chances, but OpenAI still presents an impenetrable facade. Along with this, it has built this image on the shoulders of its reputation as “the world’s greenest and leading independent AI lab.”
What is Mistral AI?
Mistral AI is a company that has raised huge sums of money since its inception in 2023, intending to “put frontier AI into everybody’s hands.” While this isn’t a direct dig at OpenAI, its motto hints at the company’s position on advocating for openness in Artificial Intelligence.
Now, the chat assistant Le Chat, which has been developed as an alternative to ChatGPT, is also available on iOS and Android. It gained 1 million downloads within two weeks after launching on mobile and even managed to be the number-one most downloaded free app in France on the iOS App Store.
This offers yet another addition to Mistral AI’s line of models:
- Mistral large 2, which replaces Mistral large as the default large language model.
- Pixtral large, which joined the Pixtral family of multimodal models in 2024 as its latest addition.
- Codestral, a code generation AI model.
- “Les Ministraux,” a family of models developed for edge devices like phones.
- Mistral Saba, which is specialized for Arabic.
Who are Mistral AI’s founders?
Mistrals AI’s founders are the three individuals who share a uniform background in AI research in some of the biggest U.S. companies with operations around Paris. CEO Arthur Mensch previously worked for DeepMind at Google, CTO Timothée Lacroix was a part of Meta, and chief scientist officer Guillaume Lample was also there.
Co-founding advisers include Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (who is also a board member) and Charles Gorintin from health insurance startup Alan, as well as former digital minister Cédric O, which caused uproar due to his previous role.
Are the models of Mistral AI open-source?
Not all of them. Mistral AI actually distinguishes its premium models, with weights that are not available for commercial purposes, from its free models, for which it makes weight accessible under the Apache 2.0 license.
These include free research models, such as Mistral NeMo, developed in partnership with Nvidia, which Mistral has open-sourced since July 2024.
How does Mistral AI make money?
While quite a few of Mistral AI’s offerings are free or now have free tiers, Mistral AI is planning to drive a good revenue from Le Chat’s paid tiers. The Pro plan of Le Chat, launched in February 2025, has a subscription fee of $14.99.
On the purely B2B side, Mistral AI monetizes its premium through APIs with usage-based pricing. Enterprises can license these models, and the company evidently also generates a fair amount of revenue from partnerships, some of which it spotlighted at the Paris AI Summit.
Overall, however, Mistral AI’s revenue is still, reportedly and according to multiple sources, in the eight-digit range.
What deals has Mistral AI struck?
Mistral AI signed in 2024 agreements with Microsoft including a partnership for the distribution of its AI models on Microsoft’s Azure platform and an investment of €15 million. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, however, quickly decided that the collaboration fell below the threshold requiring investigation due to its small size, but it was met with some criticism in the EU.
In January 2025, Mistral AI signed a contract with Agence France-Presse (AFP), empowering Chat with the ability to query the entire AFP text archive dating back to 1983.
How much money has Mistral AI raised until today?
At February 2025, Mistral AI has raised about €1 billion, that is, roughly $1.04 billion, with contributions from some debt financing and a series of equity financing rounds raised in close succession.
Mistral AI raised a record $112 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in June 2023, before releasing its first models. It was valued at $260 million based on this round, supposedly the largest seed round in Europe, just a month after being founded.
Other investors that participated 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 after six months did it close a€385 million ($415 million then)-reported Series A round at a hypothetical valuation of $2 billion. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with existing backers Lightspeed and new ones BNPP, CMA-CGM, Conviction, Elad Gil, General Catalyst, and Salesforce contributing.
Microsoft also contributed $16.3 million in convertible securities in Mistral AI, part of their joint venture announced February 2024 and called a Series A extension; that hypothetically meant no increase or change in valuation.
This all culminated in June 2024, when Mistral AI raised €600 million in a combination of equity and debt (around $640 million at the exchange rate at the time) from General Catalyst at $6 billion valuation. Cisco, IBM, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, and others participated in this much-speculated round.
What could a Mistral AI exit look like?
Mistral is “not selling,” said Mensch in January 2025 at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “IPO is, of course, the plan.”
With how much the startup has raised thus far, this hardly comes across as surprising: Such a large sale may not yield enough multiples for its investors, not to mention concerns about sovereignty depending on who the acquirer is. Scaling the revenues enough to put some margins of justification on its almost $6 billion valuation is perhaps the only way to swat down relentless acquisition rumors once and for all. Either way, stay tuned.