PARIS: French AI firm Mistral said Tuesday that it raised three billion euros in what it called the largest-ever European tech fundraising, propelling its overall value to \u20ac21 billion ($24 billion).<\/p>\n
The startup, which is considered Europe\u2019s leading AI model developer, said the funding round led by chip giant Samsung would accelerate its research and help it to expand internationally.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s notional valuation has nearly doubled since a funding round exactly a year ago, putting it within range of France\u2019s biggest blue-chip companies. While still an upstart compared to AI giants OpenAI or Anthropic, Mistral says it is winning clients by offering models they can run themselves with their own data.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis 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,\u201d Mistral\u2019s chief executive and co-founder Arthur Mensch said in a statement. Mistral said it had secured the backing of advanced manufacturers in the sector \u2014 with Dutch firm ASML having led the previous funding round and Samsung Electronics this round.<\/p>\n
Lian Jye Su, an analyst at the technology research group Omdia, said Samsung\u2019s investment would increase the South Korean company\u2019s access to the European market and \u201cfurther diversify its commercial touchpoints\u201d. \u201cFor Mistral to compete with its larger rivals, it will need more advanced technologies and business models,\u201d Su added, describing the AI lab as \u201cby far the best alternative outside of China and the US\u201d.<\/p>\n
The announcement comes during a state visit by South Korea\u2019s President Lee Jae Myung to France, where he will meet with President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday. Mistral has stepped up its spending on infrastructure this year, including its first data centre to be built in France. It signed a deal in July with Microsoft to provide AI computing capacity while offering Mistral models directly to the US tech giant\u2019s clients. Chief financial officer Johan Bergqvist told AFP the success of its latest funding round reflected its belief that size was not the sole requisite for companies looking to integrate AI capabilities.<\/p>\n
He described Mistral as \u201cmore of a mix of Palantir and Anthropic when it comes to what we can offer\u201d, referring to the Claude chatbot maker and the US data analysis specialist. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen that we can develop other models more cost efficiently than some of our peers out there,\u201d Bergqvist said. \u201cSo our need for capital is not as vast as some of those competitors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mistral also appeals to companies wary of exposing their data to US-based hyperscalers, since the AI models and their results remain in house. That push for digital sovereignty led French authorities in June to scrap Palantir data systems for its intelligence services in favor of a domestic supplier. Mistral models are also being used to roll out a French government tool for part of the civil service administration. \u201cWe want to expand across Europe,\u201d where the company is strongest, Bergqvist said, \u201cbut it\u2019s also the Middle East, Asia, North America. We see increasing demands in all these regions today.\u201d \u2014 AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS: French AI firm Mistral said Tuesday that it raised three billion euros in what it called the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220193,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[125],"tags":[98452,242,45988,1817,1816,58421,98451],"class_list":["post-220192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-emmanuel-macron","tag-cash-infusion","tag-emmanuel-macron","tag-frances","tag-kuwait-news","tag-kuwait-times","tag-mistral","tag-value-soar"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117237071442499739","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}