Mistral AI has raised €3 billion (S$4.41 billion) at a valuation of more than €21 billion from investors led by Samsung Electronics to fund the development of artificial intelligence models and build computing infrastructure.
The EU’s Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity co-led the round, the company said in a statement on Sept 8. The Paris-based startup has nearly doubled its €11.7 billion valuation from its last fundraising round in 2025.
The funding will give Mistral the ammunition to advance in industrial AI, which involves rolling out the tech for manufacturing processes and is emerging as one of the company’s key differentiators, Chief Executive Officer Arthur Mensch said in an interview.
While Mistral is a fraction of the size of generative AI behemoths such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC, the company has been selling itself as a sovereign alternative for Europe. It has struck deals with large European industrial companies including Airbus SE, BMW AG and Dutch chip-machine maker ASML Holding NV, which led Mistral’s previous round.
“This fundraising is also a way for us to further expand in the US, in Asia and of course to double down on what we’ve been doing in Europe,” Mensch said. “This is a technology that requires significant infrastructure.”
That involves owning “significant assets” such as data centres, he added.
Earlier in 2026, Mistral raised US$830 million (S$1.05 billion) in debt for a data center project outside Paris that would use Nvidia chips. The company committed a further €1.2 billion to a data centre buildout in Sweden, its first data centre investment outside France.
Similar to the ASML partnership, the agreement with Samsung “opens the door for further collaboration”, Mensch said. ASML, which participated in this most recent funding round, invested €1.3 billion for an 11 per cent stake in 2025. ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said at the time he planned to “flood the entire organisation” with AI.
Mistral was founded in 2023 by Mensch, an alumnus of Google’s DeepMind, and ex-Meta Platforms researchers Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample.
It develops open-source large language models, in contrast to the “closed” models developed by its larger American counterparts. Mensch has touted open source as more cost-efficient and easier to integrate into large, complex corporate systems.
Mensch is counting on gaining traction with European governments, fearful of relying too heavily on artificial intelligence products owned by American and Chinese companies.
US President Donald Trump’s administration compounded these fears this summer, when it ordered Anthropic to disable access to its most advanced AI models for all foreign nationals, citing national security concerns. BLOOMBERG
