Mistral raises $3.5 billion at $24 billion valuation in Europe’s biggest private tech funding round
The French company says it is on track for $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and is seeing growth in Asia and North America. The new capital will fund models and frontier research as Mistral competes with much larger American rivals.
French artificial intelligence company Mistral has raised €3 billion at a valuation of about €21 billion ($24 billion), giving Europe one of its clearest signs yet that it can produce an AI company capable of competing for global relevance even as the industry’s largest players remain overwhelmingly American.
The three-year-old company said Tuesday that the funding round was the largest equity investment ever raised by a privately held European technology company. The round was jointly led by existing investor PSG Equity and two new investors, Samsung Electronics and the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund.
The size of the financing is striking not only for Mistral but for the European technology industry. The company is now the continent’s second-most valuable private technology group and, according to its chief financial officer Johan Bergqvist, its fastest-growing company.
But the gap between Mistral and the leading American AI companies remains enormous.
Anthropic, whose Claude chatbot competes with Mistral’s models, is valued at $965 billion, while OpenAI is valued at $852 billion. Both are preparing for public listings this year, putting the European company in a race in which the scale of its American rivals is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.
Mistral’s latest financing nonetheless gives it substantially more resources to close some of that gap. Bergqvist told Reuters that the company plans to use the proceeds to power its models and invest in frontier research as it attempts to compete with larger rivals.
“The fact that the EU or Europe have to have their own kind of AI provider in the game is important,” Bergqvist told Reuters.
He pointed to the political dimension of access to advanced technology, arguing that Europe needs to ensure that its AI supply chain cannot be compromised by decisions made elsewhere.
The company has been expanding its customer base beyond Europe, with particularly strong growth in Asia and North America. Its models are also designed to be downloaded and customized by customers on their own servers, a feature that has helped Mistral build a customer base of more than 125 companies.
Mistral says it is on track to reach $1 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of this year, according to Bergqvist.
Bergqvist said an IPO remains an option for the company, but there is no immediate timetable.
An initial public offering is “always of course an optionality for us going forward,” he told Reuters, while adding that the timing remains uncertain and that Mistral is not currently engaged in discussions about one.
