What is Mistral AI? Everything to know about the OpenAI competitor

Mistral AI, the French firm behind AI assistant Le Chat and several other foundational fashions, is formally thought to be certainly one of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI.

It’s reportedly within the strategy of elevating one other spherical that might value it at $14 billion, up from about $6 billion in June, 2024. Whereas Mistral AI describes itself as “the world’s greenest and main impartial AI lab” it’s nonetheless not as nicely generally known as its greatest opponents.  

“Go and obtain Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, slightly 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.

What’s Mistral AI?

Mistral AI, which affords open-source AI fashions, has raised vital quantities of funding since its creation in 2023 with the ambition to “put frontier AI within the fingers of everybody.” Whereas this isn’t a direct jab at OpenAI, the slogan is supposed to spotlight the corporate’s openness versus OpenAI’s sometimes closed strategy.

Its various to ChatGPT, chat assistant Le Chat, is available on iOS and Android. It reached 1 million downloads within the two weeks following its cellular launch, even grabbing France’s high spot totally free downloads on the iOS App Retailer.

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

As of September 2025, Le Chat additionally has the ability to remember previous conversations with the introduction of Memories.

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

• Mistral Large 2, the first massive language mannequin changing Mistral Large.
• Pixtral Large, unveiled in 2024 as a brand new addition to the Pixtral family of multimodal models.
• 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 overtly out there beneath an Apache 2.0 license, that means it may be used commercially with out restriction.
• Codestral, an earlier generative AI mannequin for code, however whose license banned industrial purposes.
• “Les Ministraux,” a household of fashions optimized for edge devices resembling telephones.
• Mistral Saba, focused on Arabic language.

In March 2025, the corporate introduced 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 June 2025, Mistral AI additionally launched a vibe coding shopper, 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 firms with vital 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 embody 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 triggered persistent controversy because of his earlier position.

Are Mistral AI’s fashions open supply?

Not all of them. Mistral AI differentiates its premier fashions, whose weights aren’t out there for industrial functions, from its free fashions, for which it offers weight entry beneath the Apache 2.0 license.

Free fashions embody analysis fashions resembling Mistral NeMo, which was in-built collaboration with Nvidia that the startup open sourced in July 2024.

How does Mistral AI earn a living?

Whereas lots of Mistral AI’s choices are free or now have free tiers, Le Chat additionally has 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 by way of APIs with usage-based pricing. Enterprises can even license these fashions, and the corporate possible additionally generates a big share of its income from its strategic partnerships, a few of which it highlighted during the Paris AI Summit.

Total, nevertheless, Mistral AI’s income is reportedly nonetheless within the eight-digit vary, in accordance with 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 by way of 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 because of its small measurement. Nevertheless, it additionally sparked some criticism within the EU. 

In January 2025, Mistral AI signed a deal with press agency 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 army and job agency, Luxembourg, shipping giant 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 in the Paris region, 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 Citizens, “a collaborative initiative to assist States and public establishments strategically harness AI for his or her folks by remodeling public providers, catalyzing innovation, and guaranteeing competitiveness.”

What enterprise options has Mistral AI developed?

In Could 2025, Mistral AI launched the Mistral Agents API to “empower enterprises to use AI in more practical and impactful ways,” in accordance with its Head of Developer Relations, Sophia Yang.

In September 2025, the corporate unveiled a revamped Connectors directory, showcasing Le Chat’s integrations with some 20 enterprise instruments together with Asana, Atlassian, Field, Google Drive, Notion, Zapier, in addition to emails and calendars; and shortly, Databricks and Snowflake.

How a lot funding has Mistral AI raised up to now?

As of February 2025, Mistral AI raised round €1 billion in capital up to now, roughly $1.04 billion on the present alternate charge. 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 record $112 million seed round 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 buyers 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 Series 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 present backer Lightspeed, in addition to BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, Conviction, Elad Gil, Normal Catalyst, and Salesforce.

The $16.3 million convertible investment 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 mix of equity and debt (round $640 million on the alternate charge on the time). The long-rumored round was led by Normal Catalyst at a $6 billion valuation, with notable buyers, together with Cisco, IBM, Nvidia, Samsung Enterprise Funding Company, and others.

In line with Bloomberg, Mistral AI is now finalizing a €2 billion investment at a post-money valuation of $14 billion. This follows earlier studies that the corporate was in talks to raise $1 billion in fairness from buyers together with Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, in addition to a whole bunch of tens of millions of euros in debt. However

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 ‘stop the clock’ for 2 years earlier than key obligations of the EU Synthetic Intelligence Act enter into drive. The European Commision is sticking to its original timeline.

What might a Mistral AI exit appear to be?

Mistral is “not for sale,” 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 to date: Even a big sale could not present excessive sufficient multiples for its buyers, to not point out sovereignty issues relying on the acquirer. 

Nevertheless, the one strategy to undoubtedly squash persistent acquisition rumors — these days naming Apple — is to scale its income to ranges that would even remotely justify its valuation. Both method, keep tuned.

This story was initially printed on February 28, 2025 and will likely be commonly up to date.