Mistral AI is a French 📝Artificial Intelligence (AI) company founded in April 2023 in Paris that develops 📝Large Language Models (LLMs), releasing some as open-weight models under permissive licenses and offering others commercially. It sells model access through a developer API, the Le Chat assistant for individuals and businesses, and private or on-premises deployments for enterprises and governments.
Mistral was co-founded by Arthur Mensch, formerly of 📝DeepMind, and Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, both formerly of 📝Meta's AI research group. Its early releases, Mistral 7B in September 2023 and Mixtral 8x7B that December, shipped under the Apache 2.0 license and placed the company at the front of the 📝open-weight segment. In 2024 it signed a distribution and investment partnership with 📝Microsoft. ASML led a €1.7 billion Series C in September 2025 at an €11.7 billion valuation, and in September 2026 Samsung led a €3 billion Series D at a post-money valuation of about €21 billion, reported as the largest equity round ever raised by a European technology company. Mistral positions itself as the European, sovereignty-focused alternative to 📝OpenAI and 📝Anthropic, selling to governments and regulated industries that want control over where models run and where data is processed, and it is building its own compute capacity in Europe.