Mistral AI, the Paris-based artificial intelligence start-up, has raised €3bn in the largest venture funding round completed in Europe, valuing the company at more than €21bn.
The round, announced on 8 September, was led by Samsung. PSG Equity, an existing investor, and the European Union’s Scaleup Europe Fund also took part. Mistral said the money would be used to scale its computing capacity and frontier research as it positions itself as an alternative to AI models developed in Silicon Valley and China.
“This round means we can move faster on R&D [research and development], products, infrastructure and keep giving organisations the ability to run AI at scale, on their own terms,” Arthur Mensch, a co-founder and chief executive of Mistral, said.
Founded three years ago, Mistral is one of the few European companies developing its own large language models and has marketed itself as the European alternative to US groups such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Infrastructure and open-weight models
Over the past year the company has expanded into AI infrastructure, allowing it to run its own models rather than rely on another provider’s computing capacity. In March it raised $830m from a consortium of banks to buy thousands of Nvidia chips to power its data centres in France and Sweden. Nvidia itself agreed a $12.9bn deal to buy Hugging Face, the open AI model platform, on 3 September.
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