one year on
Mistral AI closes €600M Series B, valuation hits $6B
The Paris-based startup, led by General Catalyst, counts Nvidia, Samsung, Salesforce and other major backers among its investors.
PARIS — Mistral AI has closed a €600 million ($640 million) Series B funding round led by General Catalyst, valuing the company at $6 billion. The round includes €468 million in equity and €132 million in debt, according to the Financial Times.
The long list of investors includes Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, Salesforce Ventures, and many others including Cisco, IBM, and Bpifrance. Existing investor Microsoft also participated; the company recently partnered with Mistral to distribute its models on Azure.
The company, founded by alumni from Meta and Google DeepMind, has released several open-weight models under Apache 2.0 license (Mistral 7B, 8x7B, 8x22B) as well as proprietary models like Mistral Large and the code-focused Codestral. It also offers a free chat assistant, Le Chat.
“This new round puts us in a unique position to push the frontier of AI and bring state-of-the-art technology to everyone’s hands,” said Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “It guarantees the company’s continued independence, which remains fully under the founders’ control.”
Mistral has raised about $752 million in total since its $112 million seed round about a year ago. The question now is whether it can attract corporate customers and turn this engineering work into revenue.
The record
Arthur Mensch said the round puts Mistral in a 'unique position' to push the frontier of AI and 'guarantees the company's continued independence,' with the founders remaining in control.
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
Mistral's valuation held relatively steady through late 2025, though it faced increasing competition from open-weight models like Llama 3 and Qwen 2.5. The company never fully captured the enterprise market as some investors hoped, but remained a key player in European AI sovereignty discussions.