In April 2023, Mistral AI was founded in Paris by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix, three researchers from Google DeepMind and Meta’s AI lab. Within a month, the company raised €105 million ($113 million) at a €240 million valuation, the largest seed round in European history at the time. In December 2023, Mistral raised $415 million, valuing the company at nearly $2 billion before shipping a product. The company’s strategic bet was releasing open-weight models, allowing developers to download and modify them, contrasting with rivals like OpenAI. This approach converted into enterprise contracts, government deals, and a valuation north of €11 billion in under three years. As of the Series C round in September 2025, the company’s valuation was about €11.7 billion (~$13.5 billion), with a €1.7 billion Series C led by chipmaking giant ASML. A further round near €20 billion ($23 billion) was reported “in talks” by Bloomberg in June 2026. Total funding raised exceeded $3.9 billion across multiple equity and debt rounds. Annual recurring revenue was roughly $400 million as of January 2026, up from about $20 million a year earlier. The company is known for open-weight large language models, the Le Chat assistant, and European AI sovereignty.