The French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI announced the conclusion of a Series D funding round worth three billion euros, becoming the largest financing operation ever carried out by a tech company in Europe. The company's valuation rose to 21 billion euros, a figure that, while significant, remains substantially lower than that of OpenAI and Anthropic, valued at around one trillion dollars.
The round was led by Samsung and also included participation from the Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and investor PSG Equity. This operation comes just three years after the startup's founding, whose CEO is Arthur Mensch. The company's Series C had been led approximately a year ago by the Dutch company ASML.
Mistral AI currently operates in 20 countries and works with more than 125 companies worldwide, including Airbus, ASML, and HSBC. The French company focuses on an approach based on open-source models and proprietary infrastructure, seeking to give companies and governments greater control over their data, models, and computational capacity, reducing dependence on a single AI provider.
According to the company, the round will enable significant expansion of frontier research, increase computing capacity to train advanced models, extend infrastructure, and accelerate commercial growth and international presence.
