Paris (France) (AFP) – 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 21 billion euros ($24 billion). The startup, which is considered Europe’s leading AI model developer, said the funding round led by chip giant Samsung would accelerate its research and help it to expand internationally. The company’s notional valuation has nearly doubled since a funding round exactly a year ago, putting it within range of France’s 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. “This round means we can move faster on R&D, products, infrastructure and keep giving organisations the ability to run AI at scale, on their own terms,” Mistral’s chief executive and co-founder Arthur Mensch said in a statement. Mistral said it had secured the backing of advanced manufacturers in the sector — with Dutch firm ASML having led the previous funding round and Samsung Electronics this round.
Lian Jye Su, an analyst at the technology research group Omdia, said Samsung’s investment would increase the South Korean company’s access to the European market and “further diversify its commercial touchpoints.” “For Mistral to compete with its larger rivals, it will need more advanced technologies and business models,” Su added, describing the AI lab as “by far the best alternative outside of China and the US.”
The announcement came during a state visit by South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung to France, where he met 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’s 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. He described Mistral as “more of a mix of Palantir and Anthropic when it comes to what we can offer,” referring to the Claude chatbot maker and the US data analysis specialist. “We’ve seen that we can develop other models more cost efficiently than some of our peers out there,” Bergqvist said. “So our need for capital is not as vast as some of those competitors.”
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 favour of a domestic supplier. Mistral models are also being used to roll out a French government tool for part of the civil service administration. “We want to expand across Europe,” where the company is strongest, Bergqvist said, “but it’s also the Middle East, Asia, North America. We see increasing demands in all these regions today.”
Samsung and Mistral later announced a strategic partnership that will see Mistral’s technology employed to help Samsung design and manufacture computer chips for AI applications. “Mistral’s powerful AI platform is expected to provide Samsung with a unique stack of tools that will transform how semiconductors are designed and manufactured,” the companies said in a statement. They said that as semiconductor processes become more advanced and complex, rapid data analysis in chip fabrication sites is essential. “By applying targeted AI models to defect detection and equipment optimization, Samsung aims to accelerate development cycles, manufacturing precision, and yield stabilization across its advanced memory and logic chips,” the companies said.
© 2024 AFP
