Mistral, the fast-rising French AI start-up founded by Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample two years ago, is seeking a $10-billion valuation in its new fundraising round, according to the Financial Times.
The company – which has been hailed as Europe’s AI champion and a potential rival to OpenAI and DeepSeek — is looking to raise $1 billion to accelerate the commercial rollout of its chatbot, Le Chat, and further develop its large language models, among other plans. As of February, Mistral was valued at €6 billion.
Discussions are ongoing with a large range of investors, including venture capital funds and Abu Dhabi’s AI fund MGX, per the Financial Times which quoted “people familiar with the process.” The publication recently reported that Mistral’s revenues are now on track to surpass $100 million a year for the first time based on current sales. It had raised roughly $640 million during its Series B funding round in June 2024, and had raised $112 million in its seed round in 2023.
While it’s far behind deep-pocketed U.S. and Chinese AI rivals such as OpenAI and DeepSeek in terms of valuation, Mistral has promoted the cost-efficiency and transparency of its open-source technology which it says provides an alternative to proprietary AI models developed by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
Investors in Mistral include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, Salesforce Ventures, BPI France and French tech entrepreneur Xavier Niel, among others.
Just two months ago, Mistral struck a pact with Nvidia, the Santa Clara-headquartered tech giant, which will see the French company launch a European platform dedicated to AI and powered by Nvidia processors starting in 2026. The deal was described as “historic” by French President Emmanuel Macron at VivaTech, the technology fair that took place in Paris in June.
Earlier this year, Macron said he was fully committed to expanding the country’s blossoming AI ecosystem and unveiled a €109 billion ($112 billion) investment package from the private sector which will be injected into the field in the coming years.
Mistral’s client roster includes the French defense ministry, BNP Paribas, Orange and more recently Rodolphe Saadé’s shipping group CMA-CGM, which signed a €100-million deal for the next five years.