GoKawiilArthur Mensch, founder of Mistral AI, during the 'Nvidia GTC' meeting at the 2025 VivaTech conference in Paris, France, on Wednesday, June 11, 2025. Nathan Laine | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Mistral on Tuesday said it raised 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion) in fresh funding led by memory chip giant Samsung, as the French startup looks to position itself as a European alternative to rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. The investment also involved the Scaleup Europe Fund, a European Union-backed investment fund managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity. Mistral said the funding gives it a post-money valuation of more than 21 billion euros. Mistral was valued at 11.7 billion euros a year ago, after a funding round led by Dutch chip equipment maker ASML . Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral, told CNBC in an interview that the funding would go toward building more infrastructure, including its own data centers, and renting out computing capacity. "Long term, the plan is to fully rely on capacity that we are building ourselves, and so that means that the amount of compute that we own is going to grow ... around 100% in the next five years," Mensch said. The CEO added that the company will train "bigger and faster models."
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The Paris-headquartered company develops AI models and is building out its own data center footprint. It's looking to take a different approach to OpenAI and Anthropic by working with individual companies to create custom AI tools to suit their needs and integrate them with their businesses. Mistral integrates AI in the manufacturing process of Netherlands-based ASML. Mensch said Mistral would focus on a similar area with South Korea's Samsung. Mensch said earlier this year that he expects Mistral's annual recurring revenue to exceed $1 billion this year. With the new funding and partnerships, Mensch said he expects "to be beating" that figure "if everything happens as they are trending." He declined to give a revised revenue figure. "We're very confident that the fundraising we are doing today is also accelerating and enabling further growth down the line in 2027," Mensch told CNBC.
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