Paris, Sept 9 France’s AI developer Mistral has been valued at 11.7 billion euros following its latest fundraising round, which saw Dutch tech giant ASML become the top shareholder, the firm said in a statement on Tuesday.
Mistral raked in 1.7 billion euros ($2 billion) in the fundraise, which linked Europe’s top AI maker with ASML, a key producer of the machines that churn out the chips powering artificial intelligence models.
The French company has been touted as a European AI champion as technological sovereignty concerns fester between the European Union and the United States under the second administration of President Donald Trump.
The fundraise announced Tuesday is both a record for a French startup and almost doubles Mistral’s valuation from six billion euros in mid-2024.
But it remains a relative minnow compared with American giants like Anthropic, which raised cash at a $183 billion valuation this month.
ASML’s investment “aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI,” the Dutch firm said in the statement, trailing “potential for joint research” in the future.
Mistral chief executive Arthur Mensch said its AI could help ASML “solve current and future engineering challenges”, leading to benefits for both semiconductor hardware and the AI software that runs on it.
ASML’s stake in Mistral would amount to 15 percent, French daily Le Figaro reported, while multiple media reported that the Dutch company would secure a seat on the French company’s board — although neither company confirmed these details.
Mensch co-founded Mistral in 2023 after working for Google’s DeepMind AI division, while fellow founders Guillaume Lample and Timothee Lacroix previously worked at Meta’s AI lab.
The company’s key products include Le Chat, a large language model (LLM) chatbot competing with the likes of ChatGPT from the sector’s American heavyweight OpenAI.
As well as text, Mistral offers generative AI models capable of turning out images and computer code.
The company has opened offices in Paris, London, Luxembourg, New York, California’s Palo Alto and Singapore.
This year Mistral has announced a slew of partnerships, including with American chip giant Nvidia to create a cloud computing platform, or with Saudi investment fund MGX to build an AI campus outside Paris.
Mistral has also signed a deal with Agence France-Presse (AFP) for Le Chat to draw on the news agency’s decades of archives in six languages to generate responses to users’ queries about news and current events.
