French AI Startup Mistral Raises 3 Billion Euros in Funding Led by Samsung

Mistral on Tuesday said it raised 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion) in fresh funding led by memory chip giant Samsung, as the French startup looks to position itself as a European alternative to rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The investment also involved the Scaleup Europe Fund, a European Union-backed investment fund managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity. Mistral said the funding gives it a post-money valuation of more than 21 billion euros.

Mistral was valued at 11.7 billion euros a year ago, after a funding round led by Dutch chip equipment maker ASML .

Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral, told CNBC in an interview that the funding would go toward building more infrastructure, including its own data centers, and renting out computing capacity.

"Long term, the plan is to fully rely on capacity that we are building ourselves, and so that means that the amount of compute that we own is going to grow ... around 100% in the next five years," Mensch said.

The CEO added that the company will train "bigger and faster models."

The Paris-headquartered company develops AI models and is building out its own data center footprint. It's looking to take a different approach to OpenAI and Anthropic by working with individual companies to create custom AI tools to suit their needs and integrate them with their businesses.

Mistral integrates AI in the manufacturing process of Netherlands-based ASML. Mensch said Mistral would focus on a similar area with South Korea's Samsung.

Mensch said earlier this year that he expects Mistral's annual recurring revenue to exceed $1 billion this year. With the new funding and partnerships, Mensch said he expects "to be beating" that figure "if everything happens as they are trending." He declined to give a revised revenue figure.

"We're very confident that the fundraising we are doing today is also accelerating and enabling further growth down the line in 2027," Mensch told CNBC.

Mistral has been looking to bill itself as a non-U.S. and non-Chinese alternative in the AI industry, playing into a growing desire from Europe and other regions for "sovereign AI."

The Scaleup Europe Fund's investors include the European Commission as well as major corporations such as Novo Holdings and Santander.

Mistral is also focusing on open-weight AI models versus proprietary closed systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. However, it is facing intense competition from highly capable Chinese players.

Mensch said the models that will be released from Mistral "very soon" will be "very competitive."

He noted that Chinese AI labs are not actually operating or working with enterprise customers outside of China. Mistral said in some cases, Chinese AI models can be deployed on Mistral's infrastructure but that this is "not creating a very strong dependency" on Chinese AI labs as the data stays with Mistral.

Mensch said it's hard for European companies to rely on long-term support for Chinese models as it's unclear if they will be upgraded over a longer period of time or if there will be any export restrictions placed on them.

"At this point in time, we are seeing that the volatility in this space is actually quite extreme," Mensch said.

"Now we also need to be a trusted partner for our customers, and they want us to be sure to certify that in one year from now they will get access to better models than they have access to today, and the only way we can provide that guarantee is by continuing to train our models ourselves," Mensch said.