Mistral AI, the French company that develops the AI chatbot, Le Chat, and several foundational large language models, is considered one of France’s most promising tech startups, and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. “Go and download Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI — or something else,” French president Emmanuel Macron said in a TV interview ahead of the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025. In a significant step up from its June 2024 valuation of $6 billion, Mistral is now valued at €11.7 billion (approximately $13.8 billion) following a Series C funding round led by Dutch semiconductor company ASML, which invested €1.3 billion (approximately $1.5 billion) in September, alongside signing a new strategic partnership with the AI company. ASML’s interest in having its clients benefit from its collaboration is an important milestone for Mistral. While the French company describes itself as “the world’s greenest and leading independent AI lab,” it is still not as well known as its biggest competitors. What is Mistral AI? Mistral AI, which offers some open-source AI models, has raised significant funding since its creation in 2023, with the ambition to “put frontier AI in the hands of everyone.” While this isn’t a direct jab at OpenAI, the slogan is meant to highlight the company’s openness versus OpenAI’s more recent, closed-source take at developing AI models. Mistral’s chatbot Le Chat is available on iOS and Android, reaching 1 million downloads in the two weeks following its mobile release and grabbing France’s top spot for free downloads on the iOS App Store. In July 2025, Mistral AI updated Le Chat with new features that bring it closer to rival full-stack AI chatbots: a new “deep research” mode, native multilingual reasoning, and advanced image editing. This update also added Projects, which lets users group chats, documents, and ideas into focused spaces. Techcrunch event San Francisco | Oc...
First seen: 2025-09-09 12:56
Last seen: 2025-09-09 19:04