Mistral AI reportedly in talks to raise €3B at €20B valuation
French AI lab Mistral AI is in early discussions to raise approximately €3 billion, which would value the company at around €20 billion, nearly doubling its previous valuation.
French AI startup Mistral AI is in early-stage discussions to raise about €3 billion ($3.5 billion), Bloomberg reported Friday, citing anonymous sources. The funding round would value the company at approximately €20 billion (about $23.15 billion), nearly double the €11.7 billion valuation it received in a Series C round last September.
Launched in 2023, Mistral is one of Europe’s leading AI startups with the stated ambition to “put frontier AI in the hands of everyone.” The company has taken a more open approach to AI development compared to its U.S. rivals, offering some foundational large language models with open weights, allowing anyone to customize them. It also offers closed models tailored for use cases such as programming, voice cloning and generation, and optical character recognition.
Recently, as European countries distance themselves from American tech, Mistral has positioned itself as a friendlier, “sovereign” and homegrown alternative. The company is building a data center near Paris and has partnered with France’s army, the government of Luxembourg, and several major European companies.
To date, Mistral has raised only about $4 billion, per PitchBook, a fraction of what U.S. rivals OpenAI ($186 billion) and Anthropic ($161.25 billion) have raised. These labs are also valued much higher, reflecting how much further American labs have pulled ahead in revenue, model adoption, and enterprise demand. Mistral did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
