European AI startup Mistral secures record funding
French company Mistral AI has raised €3 billion in a new Series D funding round, after which its valuation exceeded €21 billion. The company calls the deal the largest equity funding round in history for a European technology company.
The round was led by Samsung Electronics. Co-leaders were Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity.
New investors also joined the funding, including Advent, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. A number of previous investors increased or maintained their stakes, including ASML, Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, General Catalyst, Lightspeed and Salesforce Ventures.
Money to go to models and computing power
Mistral plans to direct the capital raised to developing new artificial intelligence models, increasing computing power for their training, developing its own infrastructure and international expansion.
The company currently operates in 20 countries and, according to its own data, serves more than 125 large corporate clients. These include Airbus, ASML and HSBC.
Samsung's investment is the second consecutive major investment in Mistral by a leading global technology equipment manufacturer. The previous funding round was led by Dutch ASML, one of the key suppliers of equipment for producing advanced semiconductors.
For Samsung, the partnership is also strategic. Financial Times notes that Mistral's technologies can be used, in particular, to optimize complex industrial processes and semiconductor manufacturing.
Europe seeks to narrow AI gap
Mistral, founded in 2023, has become one of the main European competitors to American and Chinese developers of generative artificial intelligence. The company bets on so-called open-weight models that clients can deploy in their own infrastructure and adapt to their needs.
This approach positions Mistral as a basis for technological sovereignty - especially for companies and government agencies that seek to maintain control over data and computing infrastructure.
Meanwhile, even a record European raise demonstrates the scale of the gap with American AI leaders. Financial Times notes that Mistral's competitor - American Anthropic - has raised about $100 billion in capital and financial commitments just this year.
The new €3 billion should allow Mistral to increase spending on model training and data centers and compete more actively for large corporate clients outside Europe.
Based on materials from: Mistral AI, Financial Times
