What’s Mistral AI? Every part to know concerning the OpenAI competitor

Mistral AI, the French firm behind AI assistant Le Chat and several other foundational fashions, is formally considered one in every of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the one European firm that would compete with OpenAI. However in comparison with its $6 billion valuation, its world market share continues to be comparatively low. 

Nonetheless, the current launch of its chat assistant on cellular app shops was met with some hype, significantly in its residence nation. “Go and obtain Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, moderately than ChatGPT by OpenAI — or one thing else,” French president Emmanuel Macron mentioned in a TV interview forward of the AI Motion Summit in Paris in February 2025.

Whereas this wave of consideration could also be encouraging, Mistral AI nonetheless faces challenges in competing with the likes of OpenAI — and in doing so whereas maintaining with its self-definition as “the world’s greenest and main impartial AI lab.”

What’s Mistral AI?

Mistral AI has raised important quantities of funding since its creation in 2023 with the ambition to “put frontier AI within the arms of everybody.” Whereas this isn’t a direct jab at OpenAI, the slogan is supposed to focus on the corporate’s advocacy for openness in AI.

Its various to ChatGPT, chat assistant Le Chat, is now additionally out there on iOS and Android. It reached 1 million downloads within the two weeks following its cellular launch, even grabbing France’s prime spot free of charge downloads on the iOS App Retailer.

In July 2025, Mistral AI up to date Le Chat with new options that carry it nearer to rival full-stack AI chatbots: a brand new “deep analysis” mode, native multilingual reasoning, and superior picture modifying. This replace additionally contains the addition of Initiatives, which lets customers group chats, paperwork, and concepts into targeted areas.

This comes along with Mistral AI’s suite of fashions, which incorporates: 

• Mistral Giant 2, the first massive language mannequin changing Mistral Giant.
• Pixtral Giant, unveiled in 2024 as a brand new addition to the Pixtral household of multimodal fashions.
• Magistral, its first household of reasoning fashions, launched in June 2025.
• Mistral Medium 3, launched in Could 2025 with the promise of offering effectivity with out compromising efficiency, and finest for coding and STEM duties.
• Voxtral, Mistral’s first open supply AI audio mannequin, launched in July 2025.
• Devstral, an AI mannequin designed for coding and brazenly out there below an Apache 2.0 license, which means it may be used commercially with out restriction.
• Codestral, an earlier generative AI mannequin for code, however whose license banned business purposes.
• “Les Ministraux,” a household of fashions optimized for edge gadgets equivalent to telephones.
• Mistral Saba, targeted on Arabic language.

In March 2025, the corporate launched Mistral OCR, an optical character recognition (OCR) API that may flip any PDF right into a textual content file to make it simpler for AI fashions to ingest.

In Could 2025, it launched the Mistral Brokers API to “empower enterprises to make use of AI in additional sensible and impactful methods,” in response to its Head of Developer Relations, Sophia Yang.

In June 2025, Mistral AI additionally launched a vibe coding consumer, Mistral Code, to compete with incumbents like Windsurf, Anysphere’s Cursor, and GitHub Copilot.

Who’re Mistral AI’s founders?

Mistral AI’s three founders share a background in AI analysis at main U.S. tech corporations with important operations in Paris. CEO Arthur Mensch used to work at Google’s DeepMind, whereas CTO Timothée Lacroix and chief scientist officer Guillaume Lample are former Meta staffers.

Co-founding advisers additionally embrace Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (additionally a board member) and Charles Gorintin from medical insurance startup Alan, in addition to former digital minister Cédric O, which has precipitated persistent controversy as a result of his earlier position.

Are Mistral AI’s fashions open supply?

Not all of them. Mistral AI differentiates its premier fashions, whose weights are usually not out there for business functions, from its free fashions, for which it supplies weight entry below the Apache 2.0 license.

Free fashions embrace analysis fashions equivalent to Mistral NeMo, which was inbuilt collaboration with Nvidia that the startup open sourced in July 2024.

How does Mistral AI become profitable?

Whereas a lot of Mistral AI’s choices are free or now have free tiers, Mistral AI plans to drive some income from Le Chat’s paid tiers. Launched in February 2025, Le Chat’s Professional plan is priced at $14.99 a month.

On the purely B2B facet, Mistral AI monetizes its premier fashions via APIs with usage-based pricing. Enterprises may also license these fashions, and the corporate probably additionally generates a major share of its income from its strategic partnerships, a few of which it highlighted throughout the Paris AI Summit.

Total, nonetheless, Mistral AI’s income is reportedly nonetheless within the eight-digit vary, in response to a number of sources.

What partnerships has Mistral AI closed?

In 2024, Mistral AI entered a take care of Microsoft that included a strategic partnership for distributing its AI fashions via Microsoft’s Azure platform and a €15 million funding. The U.Okay.’s Competitors and Markets Authority (CMA) swiftly concluded that the deal didn’t qualify for investigation as a result of its small measurement. Nonetheless, it additionally sparked some criticism within the EU. 

In January 2025, Mistral AI signed a take care of press company Agence France-Presse (AFP) to let Chat question the AFP’s whole textual content archive courting again to 1983.

Mistral AI additionally secured strategic partnerships with France’s military and job company, Luxembourg, transport large CMA, German protection tech startup Helsing, IBM, Orange, and Stellantis.

In Could 2025, Mistral AI introduced it might take part within the creation of an AI Campus within the Paris area, as a part of a three way partnership with UAE-investment agency MGX, NVIDIA, and France’s state-owned funding financial institution Bpifrance.

In June 2025, it was introduced that starting in 2026, Mistral will launch a European platform devoted to AI and powered by Nvidia processors, Mistral Compute. The initative was hailed as ‘historic’ by Macron, who shared the stage with Mensch and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on the VivaTech convention shortly after the announcement.

In July 2025, it introduced AI for Residents, “a collaborative initiative to assist States and public establishments strategically harness AI for his or her individuals by remodeling public providers, catalyzing innovation, and guaranteeing competitiveness.”

How a lot funding has Mistral AI raised thus far?

As of February 2025, Mistral AI raised round €1 billion in capital thus far, roughly $1.04 billion on the present change price. This contains some debt financing, in addition to a number of fairness financing rounds raised in shut succession.

In June 2023, and earlier than it even launched its first fashions, Mistral AI raised a file $112 million seed spherical led by Lightspeed Enterprise Companions. Sources on the time mentioned the seed spherical — Europe’s largest ever — valued the then-one-month-old startup at $260 million. 

Different traders on this seed spherical included Bpifrance, Eric Schmidt, Exor Ventures, First Minute Capital, Headline, JCDecaux Holding, La Famiglia, LocalGlobe, Motier Ventures, Rodolphe Saadé, Sofina, and Xavier Niel.

Solely six months later, it closed a Collection A of €385 million ($415 million on the time), at a reported valuation of $2 billion. The spherical was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from current backer Lightspeed, in addition to BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, Conviction, Elad Gil, Basic Catalyst, and Salesforce.

The $16.3 million convertible funding that Microsoft made in Mistral AI as a part of their partnership introduced in February 2024 was introduced as a Collection A extension, implying an unchanged valuation.

In June 2024, Mistral AI then raised €600 million in a mixture of fairness and debt (round $640 million on the change price on the time). The long-rumored spherical was led by Basic Catalyst at a $6 billion valuation, with notable traders, together with Cisco, IBM, Nvidia, Samsung Enterprise Funding Company, and others.

Mistral AI is now reportedly in talks to boost $1 billion in fairness from traders together with Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, has nicely as a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of euros in debt.

How is Mistral AI approaching AI regulation?

Mensch was a part of a gaggle of European CEOs who signed an open letter in July 2025 urging Brussels to ‘cease the clock’ for 2 years earlier than key obligations of the EU Synthetic Intelligence Act enter into pressure. The European Commision is sticking to its unique timeline.

What may a Mistral AI exit seem like?

Mistral is “not on the market,” Mensch mentioned in January 2025 on the World Financial Discussion board in Davos. “In fact, [an IPO is] the plan.” 

This is sensible, given how a lot the startup has raised thus far: Even a big sale might not present excessive sufficient multiples for its traders, to not point out sovereignty considerations relying on the acquirer. 

Nonetheless, the one approach to positively squash persistent acquisition rumors — these days naming Apple — is to scale its income to ranges that would even remotely justify its practically $6 billion valuation. Both approach, keep tuned.

This story was initially printed on February 28, 2025 and shall be repeatedly up to date.