If you heard rumors drifting across Parisian vineyards, you would have heard that Mistral AI, a French startup, has its sights on conquering OpenAI.
This startup has glitz and glamour all around it, with stage effects that don’t require fog. Shall we?
French Revolution Again?
Founded in April 2023, the Mistral AI team comprises some notable researchers, including Arthur Mensch, formerly of DeepMind, and Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, both formerly of Meta.
This is one smart brain trust.
You could say it’s a brand-new startup that went straight up from the seed round at €105 million to an astronomical $6 billion in June 2024, and they’re not selling to you just yet. IPO, I say!
The “Le Chat” effect
Bet on it, weirdo Le Chat, the chatbot of Mistral, is not just any pretty face: it went crazy, achieving a million downloads in just two weeks from mobile stores.
It even received a special endorsement from French President Macron himself: “The only real chatbot is Le Chat. Download Le Chat, not ChatGPT!”.
Recent updates have added deep research mode, native multilingual reasoning, image editing, and Projects, allowing you to organize your chats without them spiraling into a messy inbox.
The Framework: Mistral’s Model Lineup
Lean into this mindset: It is not just a solitary model, but the entire ecosystem:
- Mistral Large 2 is a reigning multitasker with a distant multilingual and coding skillset.
- Mistral Medium 3 delivers cheap performance in terms of STEM and code.
- Magistral is the premier pure reinforcement learning reasoning model, scheduled for release in June 2025.
Pixtral Large, Voxtral (open-source audio), Devstral (open-source coding agent), Codestral, Les Ministraux (edge-optimized), and even Mistral Saba for Arabic users.
And they’ve gone ahead and unleashed Mistral OCR to extract text from PDFs, the Agents API for B2B use, and the Mistral Code client to compete with Copilot.
Insider Information: Investors and Money
A Paris-based operation has received significant support from several investors.
They include Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, Microsoft (through Azure), and General Catalyst, along with €16 million specifically injected.
Cisco, IBM, Samsung Ventures, and the shipping company CMA CGM are also some other
investors included in the project. These investments have helped the business grow.
Revenue? Le Chat Pro is $14.99 per month, plus enterprise model licensing and usage-based APIs, billed in eight-figure increments.
Green, Free, and Independent AI
Mistral calls itself the “greenest and leading independent AI lab in the world,” governed by openness and environmental responsibility.
From media disinformation or press information, open-weighted models (examples: Devstral, Mistral 7B, some versions of Pixtral) are available under the Apache 2.0 license for commercial and community hacking.
Large 2, on the other hand, being a premium model, is gate-kept.
What does the Future hold?
A group of companies, including Nvidia, IBM, Orange, Stellantis, and the French army, along with the Luxembourg government, is collaborating to establish an AI campus in Europe.
Their goal is to make Europe a strong leader in AI technology, driven by Mistral.
They are requesting a two-year pause on specific AI regulations from Brussels, allowing them to innovate without restrictions.
Thus, the world’s open‑source AI champ is homegrown in Paris, serving sass, speed, and serious tech to users. Open weights, deep research, reasoning models, and the cheeky Le Chat: Europe’s dark horse is here, and yes, it’s trying to steal your AI thunder.
