Mistral AI

Mistral AI SAS (French: [mistʁal]) is a French artificial intelligence (AI) company, headquartered in Paris. Founded in 2023, it has open-weight large language models (LLMs), with both open-source and proprietary AI models. As of 2025 the company has a valuation of more than US$14 billion.

Namesake

The company is named after the mistral, a powerful, cold wind in southern France, a term which originates from the Occitan language.

History

Mistral AI was established in April 2023 by three French AI researchers, Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix.

Mensch, an expert in advanced AI systems, is a former employee of Google DeepMind; Lample and Lacroix, meanwhile, are large-scale AI models specialists who had worked for Meta Platforms.

The trio originally met during their studies at École Polytechnique.

On May 19, 2026, Mistral AI announced its acquisition of the Austrian company Emmi AI, which develops artificial intelligence simulation models for industrial engineering.

Company operation

Funding

In June 2023, the start-up carried out a first fundraising of €105 million ($117 million) with investors including the American fund Lightspeed Venture Partners, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel and JCDecaux. The valuation was then estimated by the Financial Times at €240 million ($267 million).

On 10 December 2023, Mistral AI announced that it had raised €385 million ($428 million) as part of its second fundraising. This round of financing involves the Californian fund Andreessen Horowitz, BNP Paribas and the software publisher Salesforce. It was valued at over €2 billion.

On 26 February 2024, Microsoft announced an investment of $16 million in Mistral AI.

On 16 April 2024, reporting revealed that Mistral was in talks to raise €500 million, a deal that would more than double its current valuation to at least €5 billion.

In June 2024, Mistral AI secured a €600 million ($645 million) funding round, increasing its valuation to €5.8 billion ($6.2 billion). Based on valuation, as of June 2024, the company was ranked fourth globally in the AI industry, and first outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

In April 2025, Mistral AI announced a €100 million partnership with the shipping company CMA CGM.

In August 2025, the Financial Times reported that Mistral was in talks to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. In September 2025, Bloomberg announced that Mistral AI has secured a €2 billion investment valuing it at €12 billion ($14 billion). This comes after $1.5 billion investment from Dutch company ASML, which owns 11% of Mistral.

In February 2026, Mistral acquired Koyeb, a Paris-based AI startup.

Later that month, Mistral AI announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Accenture to help enterprises deploy sovereign AI solutions at scale.

In March 2026 Mistral raised $830 million in order to build new datacenters near Paris and in Sweden.

Services

On 19 November, 2024, the company announced updates for Le Chat (pronounced /ləʃa/ in French, like the French word for "cat"). It added the ability to create images, using Black Forest Labs' Flux Pro model.

On 6 February 2025, Mistral AI released Le Chat on iOS and Android mobile devices.

Mistral AI also introduced a Pro subscription tier, priced at $14.99 per month, which provides access to more advanced models, unlimited messaging, and web browsing.

At the end of May 2026, Le Chat was renamed Vibe, and new features were introduced at the same time.

Models

The following table lists the main model versions of Mistral, describing the significant changes included with each version:

Mistral 7B

Mistral AI claimed in the Mistral 7B release blog post that the model outperforms LLaMA 2 13B on all benchmarks tested, and is on par with LLaMA 34B on many benchmarks tested, despite having only 7 billion parameters, a small size compared to its competitors.

Mixtral 8x7B

Mistral AI claimed in 2023 that its model beat both LLaMA 70B, and GPT-3.5 in most benchmarks.

In March 2024, research conducted by Patronus AI comparing performance of LLMs on a 100-question test with prompts to generate text from books protected under U.S. copyright law found that OpenAI's GPT-4, Mixtral, Meta AI's LLaMA-2, and Anthropic's Claude 2 generated copyrighted text verbatim in 44%, 22%, 10%, and 8% of responses respectively.

Mistral Small 3.1

On 17 March 2025, Mistral released Mistral Small 3.1 as a smaller, more efficient model.[non-primary source needed]

Mistral Medium 3

On 7 May 2025, Mistral AI released Mistral Medium 3.[non-primary source needed]

Magistral Small and Magistral Medium

On 10 June 2025, Mistral AI released their first AI reasoning models: Magistral Small (open-source), and Magistral Medium, models which are purported to have chain-of-thought capabilities.

Mistral Large 3 and Ministral 3

On 2 December 2025, Mistral AI released Mistral Large 3, a sparse, mixture-of-experts model with 41 billion active parameters and 675 billion total parameters, and Ministral 3, three small, dense models with 3 billion, 7 billion and 14 billion parameters.

Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2

On 10 December 2025, Mistral AI released Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2. Devstral Small 2, a 24B parameter model is claimed to achieve better performance at coding than Qwen 3 Coder Flash model which is a 30B parameter model.

See also

• Reasoning model
• List of large language models
• Lists of open-source artificial intelligence software

External links

• on GitHub