Mistral AI raised 3 billion euros, about 3.5 billion dollars, in a Series D round led by Samsung Electronics, taking the French startup to a valuation above 21 billion euros. The company said on 8 September that this is the largest equity round ever completed by a European technology firm. Samsung led alongside EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund and the existing investor PSG Equity, with earlier backers including ASML, Nvidia and Andreessen Horowitz also joining. The round comes almost a year after a 2 billion dollar Series C that valued Mistral at 13.7 billion dollars.
Chief executive Arthur Mensch told CNBC that Mistral is on track to pass 1 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue before the end of the year, and that the new money would go towards building and owning data centres while renting extra capacity for now. The aim, he said, is to run mostly on its own compute within five years. ASML, which took a stake and a board seat in the Series C, remains the second-largest shareholder.
Mistral’s pitch is sovereignty. European governments and companies that do not want to route sensitive work through American providers are the customers the valuation is built on. That case has carried the company to a 21 billion euro price tag in under three years, though it still sits an order of magnitude below OpenAI and Anthropic.
Mistral has not said how much of the money funds models rather than buildings, nor named a site or a date for the owned data centres. The 1 billion dollar revenue figure is a target for a year not yet finished. Whether a preference for a European option converts into revenue at the scale the round implies is the thing still being tested.
