Meet Mistral AI Europes Answer To OpenAI

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 and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its 6 billion dollar valuation its global market share is still relatively low.

However the recent launch of its chat assistant on mobile app stores was met with some hype particularly in its home country. Go and download Le Chat which is made by Mistral rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI or something else French president Emmanuel Macron said in a TV interview ahead of the AI Action Summit in Paris.

While this wave of attention may be encouraging Mistral AI still faces challenges in competing with the likes of OpenAI and in doing so while keeping up with its self definition as the world’s greenest and leading independent AI lab.

Understanding Mistral AI

Mistral AI has raised significant amounts of funding since its creation in 2023 with the ambition to put frontier AI in the hands of everyone. While this isn’t a direct jab at OpenAI the slogan is meant to highlight the company’s advocacy for openness in AI.

Its alternative to ChatGPT chat assistant Le Chat is now also available on iOS and Android. It reached 1 million downloads in the two weeks following its mobile release even grabbing France’s top spot for free downloads on the iOS App Store.

This comes in addition to Mistral AI’s suite of models which includes:

• Mistral Large 2 the primary large language model replacing Mistral Large.
• Pixtral Large unveiled in 2024 as a new addition to the Pixtral family of multimodal models.
• Mistral Medium 3 released in May 2025 with the promise of providing efficiency without compromising performance and best for coding and STEM tasks.
• Devstral an AI model designed for coding and openly available under an Apache 2.0 license meaning it can be used commercially without restriction.
• Codestral an earlier generative AI model for code but whose license banned commercial applications.
• Les Ministraux a family of models optimized for edge devices such as phones.
• Mistral Saba focused on Arabic language.

In March 2025 the company introduced Mistral OCR an optical character recognition OCR API that can turn any PDF into a text file to make it easier for AI models to ingest.

The Founders of Mistral AI

Mistral AI’s three founders share a background in AI research at major U.S. tech companies with significant operations in Paris. CEO Arthur Mensch used to work at Google’s DeepMind while CTO Timothée Lacroix and chief scientist officer Guillaume Lample are former Meta staffers.

Co founding advisers also include Jean Charles Samuelian Werve also a board member and Charles Gorintin from health insurance startup Alan as well as former digital minister Cédric O which caused controversy due to his previous role.

Mistral AIs Stance on Open Source

Not all of them. Mistral AI differentiates its premier models whose weights 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 startup open sourced in July 2024.

How Mistral AI Generates Revenue

While many of Mistral AI’s offerings are free or now have free tiers Mistral AI plans to drive some revenue from Le Chat’s paid tiers. Introduced in February 2025 Le Chat’s Pro plan is priced at 14.99 dollars a month.

On the purely B2B side Mistral AI monetizes its premier models through APIs with usage based pricing. Enterprises can also license these models and the company likely also generates a significant share of its revenue from its strategic partnerships some of which it highlighted during the Paris AI Summit.

Overall however Mistral AI’s revenue is reportedly still in the eight digit range according to multiple sources.

Key Partnerships Forged by Mistral AI

In 2024 Mistral AI entered a deal with Microsoft that included a strategic partnership for distributing its AI models through Microsoft’s Azure platform and a 15 million euro investment. The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority CMA swiftly concluded that the deal didn’t qualify for investigation due to its small size. However it also sparked some criticism in the EU.

In January 2025 Mistral AI signed a deal with press agency Agence France Presse AFP to let Chat query the AFP’s entire text archive dating back to 1983.

Mistral AI also secured strategic partnerships with France’s army and job agency shipping giant CMA German defense tech startup Helsing IBM Orange and Stellantis.

In May 2025 Mistral AI announced it would participate in the creation of an AI Campus in the Paris region as part of a joint venture with UAE investment firm MGX NVIDIA and France’s state owned investment bank Bpifrance.

Mistral AIs Impressive Funding Milestones

As of February 2025 Mistral AI raised around 1 billion euros in capital to date approximately 1.04 billion dollars at the current exchange rate. This includes some debt financing as well as several equity financing rounds raised in close succession.

In June 2023 and before it even released its first models Mistral AI raised a record 112 million dollar seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Sources at the time said the seed round Europe’s largest ever valued the then one month old startup at 260 million dollars.

Other investors 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 six months later it closed a Series A of 385 million euros 415 million dollars at the time at a reported valuation of 2 billion dollars. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz a16z with participation from existing backer Lightspeed as well as BNP Paribas CMA CGM Conviction Elad Gil General Catalyst and Salesforce.

The 16.3 million dollar convertible investment that Microsoft made in Mistral AI as part of their partnership announced in February 2024 was presented as a Series A extension implying an unchanged valuation.

In June 2024 Mistral AI then raised 600 million euros in a mix of equity and debt around 640 million dollars at the exchange rate at the time. The long rumored round was led by General Catalyst at a 6 billion dollar valuation with notable investors including Cisco IBM Nvidia Samsung Venture Investment Corporation and others.

Exploring Mistral AIs Potential Exit Strategy

Mistral is not for sale Mensch said in January 2025 at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Of course an IPO is the plan.

This makes sense given how much the startup has raised so far. Even a large sale may not provide high enough multiples for its investors not to mention sovereignty concerns depending on the acquirer.

However the only way to definitely squash persistent acquisition rumors is to scale its revenue to levels that could even remotely justify its nearly 6 billion dollar valuation. Either way stay tuned.

This story was originally published on February 28 2025 and will be regularly updated.