Mistral AI, the Paris-based artificial intelligence company, has raised €3 billion in a Series D funding round that values it at more than €21 billion, according to Sifted and Tech.eu. The company describes it as the largest equity fundraise ever completed by a European technology firm.
The round was led by Samsung Electronics, the South Korean electronics giant, three years after Mistral was founded. Co-leading were the Scaleup Europe Fund, an EU-linked vehicle managed by the investment firm EQT, and PSG Equity, which had already backed Mistral in earlier rounds.
A widening investor base
New investors joining the round include the US private equity firm Advent, funds managed by BlackRock, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which is investing directly. They join a long list of returning backers, among them the Dutch chip equipment maker ASML, the US chipmaker NVIDIA, venture firm a16z, and Salesforce Ventures, alongside European banks BNP Paribas CIB and Belfius.
ASML’s continued involvement is notable. The Dutch company, whose lithography machines are essential to advanced chip production worldwide, also led Mistral’s previous funding round, a €1.7 billion Series C that valued the startup at €11.7 billion roughly a year earlier. That means Mistral’s valuation has almost doubled in twelve months.
Building a ‘European’ AI company
Mistral was founded in Paris in 2023 by former researchers from Meta and Google DeepMind, with an explicit goal of building a European alternative to American AI giants. The company says it now operates in 20 countries and supports more than 125 enterprise customers, including Airbus, ASML and the bank HSBC.
“We left big US tech to create a company in Europe, to show that Europe had something to say,” said Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s cofounder, quoted by Sifted.
Mensch has previously stressed that Mistral intends to remain independent rather than be acquired by a larger foreign competitor. “That’s still the project and so the independence we have is something that we value dearly,” he told Sifted.
Mistral says the new capital will go towards expanding its AI research and computing capacity, building out infrastructure and products, and supporting further commercial and international growth.
Still a long way behind US rivals
Even at €21 billion, Mistral’s valuation remains far below those of its American competitors. OpenAI and Anthropic are each valued at around $1 trillion, roughly fifty times Mistral’s size. The gap illustrates both the scale of capital flowing into US AI development and the challenge facing European efforts, including the Scaleup Europe Fund, to keep ambitious technology companies funded and headquartered on the continent rather than seeing them bought out or drawn abroad.
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