Volkswacht Bodensee - French AI firm Mistral valued at 21 bn euros after latest funding

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.

While still an upstart compared to the AI giants OpenAI or Anthropic, Mistral says it is carving a niche by offering models that companies 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.

"Organisations want to industrialise AI inside systems that are already complex: their own data, their own tools, their own compliance constraints."

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.

- Competing on price -

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 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."

O.Schlaepfer--VB