# Mistral AI — Open generative AI models and assistants.

Mistral AI builds open and portable generative AI models for developers and enterprises, including the Mistral and Mixtral large language models and the Le Chat assistant.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Paris, France

Category

Foundational AI, Developer Tools, Open Source

Legal name

Mistral AI SAS

## Highlights

Notable milestones from Mistral AI’s journey — funding rounds, launches, and other moments worth knowing.

Funding - Sep 2025

### Series C: €1.7B led by ASML at a ~$14B valuation

Chip-tooling giant ASML put in €1.3B to become Mistral's largest shareholder (~11%), anchoring Europe's biggest AI raise and roughly doubling the valuation to about $14B.

Round

Series C

Raised

$2B

Valuation

$14B

Led by

ASML

[Source](https://mistral.ai/news/series-c)

Expansion - Jun 2025

### Mistral Compute: building Europe's own AI cloud with Nvidia

Unveiled at VivaTech with Macron (who called it "historic") and Jensen Huang on stage, Mistral Compute puts 18,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips into a data center south of Paris — a bid to give Europe a sovereign alternative to the US hyperscalers it depends on.

[Source](https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-compute)

Milestone - Feb 2025

### Le Chat hits 1M downloads in 14 days — with a push from the President

Days after the mobile app launched, it topped France's App Store and crossed a million downloads in two weeks. Macron went on TV telling French citizens to "download Le Chat, made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT" — turning the startup into a national champion ahead of the Paris AI Action Summit.

**Le Chat fielding a question in French — the assistant that topped France's App Store.**

[Screenshot via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Exemple_Mistral_Le_Chat.png)

[Source](https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/19/mistrals-le-chat-tops-1m-downloads-in-just-14-days/)

Funding - Jun 2024

### Series B: €600M triples the valuation to ~$6B

General Catalyst led a $645M round that lifted Mistral to a roughly $6B valuation in just six more months, with Nvidia, Samsung, Cisco and existing backers piling in.

Round

Series B

Raised

$645M

Valuation

$6.2B

Led by

General Catalyst

[Source](https://mistral.ai/news/series-b-funding-round)

Launch - Feb 2024

### Mistral Large and Le Chat land, with Microsoft as distributor

Mistral's first flagship closed model arrived alongside Le Chat, its consumer assistant — and a partnership putting the models on Azure, plus a $16M Microsoft investment that drew EU antitrust scrutiny.

[Source](https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large)

Funding - Dec 2023

### Series A: €385M at a $2B+ valuation, six months in

Andreessen Horowitz led a round that valued the barely-half-year-old startup at over $2B — a roughly 8x markup on the seed — with BNP Paribas and Salesforce also joining.

Round

Series A

Raised

$428M

Valuation

$2.1B

Led by

Andreessen Horowitz

[Source](https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ai-raises-385-mln)

Launch - Dec 2023

### Mixtral 8x7B brings mixture-of-experts to open weights

A sparse MoE model, again released as a torrent before any blog post, that matched or beat GPT-3.5 and Llama 2 70B while only activating a fraction of its parameters per token — setting a new bar for open models.

[Source](https://mistral.ai/news/mixtral-of-experts)

Launch - Sep 2023

### Mistral 7B ships as a magnet link

The debut model dropped via a bare BitTorrent link on X, then Hugging Face — Apache 2.0, free to use commercially. It outperformed Llama 2 13B across benchmarks despite being nearly half the size.

[Source](https://mistral.ai/news/announcing-mistral-7b)

Funding - Jun 2023

### €105M seed — the largest in European history, before a single product

Lightspeed led a record seed for a four-week-old company with no model yet, joined by Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel and Bpifrance. The raise valued Mistral at roughly $260M on a pitch deck alone.

Round

Seed

Raised

$117M

Valuation

$267M

Led by

Lightspeed Venture Partners

[Source](https://mistral.ai/news/announcing-mistral-ai)

Team - Apr 2023

### Three researchers leave DeepMind and Meta to build Europe's answer to OpenAI

Arthur Mensch (ex-DeepMind) teamed up with Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix (ex-Meta, where they helped build LLaMA) to found Mistral in Paris, betting that open-weight models could rival the closed American labs.

**Co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch, formerly a researcher at DeepMind.**

[Photo: Slush (CC BY 4.0)](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arthur_Mensch.jpg)

[Source](https://mistral.ai/news/about-mistral-ai)