Mistral Raises €3bn to Compete with US and China

Europe’s biggest AI company has raised a record €3bn (£2.6bn) as the Continent’s tech bosses scramble to keep pace with the US and China.

Mistral has secured a valuation of more than €21bn following the fundraising round, which is the largest ever for a European tech business.

The investment was led by South Korea’s Samsung, while the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund and existing backer PSG Equity also contributed.

The French AI giant said the fresh cash injection would help it to scale up compute capacity required to develop its large language models, as well as to expand infrastructure and accelerate commercial growth.

Paris-based Mistral is seen as the leading contender to spearhead Europe’s AI ambitions, though it is still dwarfed by US rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

OpenAI closed a $122bn (£90bn) fundraising round earlier this year, while Anthropic is gearing up for a stock market flotation that could value the Claude maker at $2tn.

Mistral, which launched three years ago, is developing “open” AI models, whose source code can be accessed and modified by any user.

It also allows organisations to retain their own data – a feature the company says boosts its credentials as a trusted sovereign alternative to foreign tech firms.

Arthur Mensch, the co-founder and chief executive of Mistral, said: “Organisations want to industrialise AI inside systems that are already complex: their own data, their own tools, their own compliance constraints.

“That’s the real problem. It’s why we’ve built Mistral on open-weight frontier models and infrastructure that we control end to end, so our customers can too.”