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Exclusive: EQT’s €5bn Scaleup Fund in talks to lead Mistral round

Sifted 16 July 2026, 16:00

Swedish investment firm EQT is in talks to lead or co-lead a Series D funding round for French AI company Mistral through its €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund. The round values Mistral between €8 billion and €16 billion according to sources familiar with the deal. EQT's involvement as a lead investor would provide significant capital to support Mistral's continued development and expansion of its AI models and services.

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TLDRocket 21 July 2026

The open-weight AI model market hit an inflection point today as Alibaba and Kimi released trillion-parameter competitors that challenge the closed-model orthodoxy—just as Washington moved to restrict them. Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 Max (2.4 trillion parameters) and Kimi K3 (2.8T) are going open-weight, with K3 ranking first on Frontend Web App Arena and fourth on agentic benchmarks, signaling that scale and transparency can coexist. The timing matters: while U.S. policymakers weigh layered restrictions on Chinese open models, technical experts are pushing back hard, arguing that closed gardens actually hurt security and competition more than they help. The real fragmentation risk isn't technical—it's regulatory.

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Exclusive: EQT’s €5bn Scaleup Fund in talks to lead Mistral round

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