Mistral said Tuesday it had raised three billion euros ($3.5 billion) in what it described as the largest-ever European tech equity fundraising, valuing the French AI firm at over 21 billion euros. The startup, which is considered Europe's leading AI model developer and was valued at nearly 12 billion euros following the previous funding round, said new the funding would help expand its leading-edge research. "This round means we can move faster on R&D, products, infrastructure and keep giving organizations the ability to run AI at scale, on their own terms," Mistral's chief executive and co-founder Arthur Mensch said in a statement. The company emphasized it is focusing on so-called open-weight AI models that companies can run themselves with their own data. "Organizations want to industrialize AI inside systems that are already complex: their own data, their own tools, their own compliance constraints," AFP quoted Mensch as saying. "It's why we've built Mistral on open-weight frontier models and infrastructure that we control end to end, so our customers can too," he added. With the Dutch maker of chip-making machines ASML leading the previous funding round and Samsung Electronics this round, Mistral said it had attracted the support of advanced manufacturers in the sector. "This support reflects growing confidence that Mistral's approach can help organizations deploy state-of-the-art AI inside complex real-world environments while maintaining control over their data, infrastructure and knowledge," the company said. Mistral has increased its spending on infrastructure this year, including a data center, its first, which will be built in France, in addition to a commercial agreement with Microsoft.
