Samsung leads Mistral’s €3B round, pushing Europe’s AI champion to a €21B valuation
Tech Funding News Sofia Chesnokova ● Covered by 9 sources
Samsung led a €3B round for Mistral, lifting it above €21B. Europe’s AI darling is now backed by chip giants, and it’s betting on open models.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Sofia Chesnokova — read the original for the full story.
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Mistral just closed a €3 billion Series D, pushing the Paris lab’s valuation to more than €21 billion. Samsung Electronics led the round, with the EQT Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity also joining in. By Mistral’s telling, that makes it the largest equity raise ever by a European tech company. It also nearly doubles the valuation from its previous Series C, which ASML led last year.
The company’s rise is fast even by AI standards. Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix left Google DeepMind and Meta in 2023 to build a European answer to OpenAI and Anthropic. They now run a business with more than 1,000 employees, and Mistral says the new money will go toward more research, more training capacity and more international expansion. On top of that, the firm has already committed €4 billion to European data centres.
The investor list is getting more interesting, too. Advent, some BlackRock funds and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg are new backers. Returning names include a16z, ASML, Belfius, BNP Paribas CIB, Bpifrance, Carmignac, DST Global, Eurazeo, General Catalyst, Headline, Hillspire, Index Ventures, Korelya Capital, Lightspeed, Nvidia, Phoenix Court’s Solar fund and Salesforce Ventures. ASML, Samsung and Nvidia are now not just suppliers and cloud partners, but shareholders as well.
Mistral is still small next to the US giants it is chasing, but that is not really the point of the story. The company is leaning hard into open-weight models and infrastructure it controls end to end, a pitch aimed at enterprises and governments that want AI they can run inside their own systems. That has won it more than 125 enterprise customers across 20 countries, including Airbus, ASML and HSBC.
The real test is whether “European sovereignty” is a buying motive or just a conference slogan. Mistral can raise eye-popping sums and still lose deals if a US lab shows up with the better model. That’s the part of the race nobody can fund away.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Europe loves cheering for “its” AI champion, but buying a stake is the easy part. The harder part is choosing slower, more controllable tech over the flashier US product when the deadline is real and the lawyer is already in the room. That is where sovereignty stops being a slogan and starts being a procurement headache.
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