The French AI company Mistral has raised €3 billion in growth capital in a funding round with Samsung as the lead investor.
The other financiers in this round are the Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing shareholder PSG Equity.
The company wants to use the money to carry out more AI research, to build its models, to buy more computing power and to invest in operations.
Mistral is somewhat different from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic in the sense that its AI models have open weights. This means that customers can inspect the source code and adapt parts of it as they wish. This approach ensures that a customer is not swallowed up in a tech silo and that there is no pernicious lock-in. It is the same approach used by most major Chinese AI labs.
In addition, the French brandish the term ‘sovereign AI’ as another way of projecting independence. The website mentions four forms of control in this context: data, models, computing power and production systems.
The Series C round was led by the Dutch company ASML, which has a French CEO. That round raised €1.7 billion, valuing the Paris-based AI startup at €11.7 billion.
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