Mistral bags €3B to build Europe's sovereign AI champion

AI AND ML

Samsung-led round values the French model maker at more than €21B

Paris-based AI darling Mistral has raised €3 billion in Series D funding, giving it a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion. That makes it a minnow compared with OpenAI, but Mistral says it is the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company.

Mistral is pitching itself as a sovereign alternative to US giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The company wrote: "During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model.

"Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop."

Mistral's answer, unsurprisingly, is its own combination of open-weight models, infrastructure, and compute capacity. The pitch is aimed at organizations and public...

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