Hundreds of heads of states, tech CEOs and nonprofits have flocked to Paris for the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit. So far, the winner of this week’s diplomatic and business parade seems to be Mistral. In business lingo, we would say that the French AI unicorn is experiencing tailwinds.
Mistral has been one of the leading artificial intelligence companies in Europe. Originally, it released some impressive open-weight models and on the back of a lot of interest in Large Language Models, Generative AI, and its open-source approach, it managed to raise over $1 billion in very little time.
However, its influence has been fading over the past few months — not least because of what has been happening with LLM startups across the ponds.
OpenAI has raised a grand total of $18 billion — and might soon be picking up $40 billion more — while Anthropic has secured around $8 billion. At the same time, Chinese competitors like DeepSeek have released open-weight models that perform better than Mistral’s models.
Mistral couldn’t outperform DeepSeek or outraise American competitors. But the AI Action Summit has come at the right time to change the narrative around the French startup.
Now, Mistral is getting serious about business.
“We’ve gone from a science company that focused on making the strongest models for laptops at the time, to a company that is now providing solutions to enterprises, that is making custom applications, that is bringing knowledge, productivity to workers,” Mistral’s co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said at the summit.
Last week, the company released Le Chat on iOS and Android, its AI assistant designed for both consumers and enterprise clients. And this week, it appears to be benefitting from an unprecedented support campaign from top policymakers in France.
“Go and download Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI or something else,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a TV interview on Sunday evening. “We want them to invest in France and develop partnerships. When you download it, you’re helping a European champion, a French champion. You’re creating jobs here, but you’re also making them stronger. And that’s what sovereignty is all about.”
Le Chat is currently the most downloaded iOS app in France. However, the app isn’t really taking off in other European markets. It is currently tanked #66 Germany, and it’s not even listed in the top 100 apps in Spain, Italy and the U.K.
Renewed focus on the enterprise market
But Mistral isn’t betting its company on consumer success: as of now, it expects to make money from enterprise customers, and in part the event in Paris has turned into a showcase for Mistral to talk about how it’s doing on that front.
“We’ve partnered with France Travail [the national employment agency]. They now use our technologies to make it easier for jobseekers to find and access job listings,” Mensch said in a TV interview with TF1 on Sunday. “We’ve also partnered with Veolia to improve the efficiency of their [wastewater] plants … so that they can understand what’s going on in their plants at any given moment.”
At the AI Action Summit, John Elkann, Stellantis’ chairman, also announced a wide-ranging deal with Mistral. “We are already actually doing a lot of things jointly within our own internal organization,“ Elkann said.
By the end of the year, the car manufacturer behind the Peugeot, Citroën, Fiat and Jeep brands will update its mobile app to include to replace the owner’s manual with a Mistral-powered AI assistant. Ideally, this is a first step in a bigger relationship.
“As we go forward, we think that the drivers are going to be asking for information and controlling the vehicle through artificial intelligence, through connections to the web, but also embedded devices that are running on the edge, that are much more efficient, that are very low latency, that are controllable by voice,” Mensch said.
Mistral said it is also partnering with Helsing, a European defense company working on strike drones and electronic components in European fighter jets. In that case, Mistral is working on new “Vision-Language-Action models” that are likely going to run on edge devices.
At least for now, the company has a couple of aces up its sleeve in terms of what it’s able to provide to these enterprise customers.
Mistral lets you deploy Le Chat in your environment with custom models and a custom user interface. If you work in defense or banking, you may need to be able to deploy an AI assistant on premise. That is not currently possible with ChatGPT Enterprise or Claude Enterprise.
Mistral also is offering its frontier models through an API that developers can use in their own applications.
With the Helsing partnership in particular, Mistral proves that it’s important to have a European AI champion. Now, let’s see if Mistral can convince other European countries that they could also rely on a European provider.
“Mistral is Europe’s chance and we only get one chance. Everyone has to work with Mistral,” said Nicolas Dufourcq, the CEO of Bpifrance. (Bpifrance happens also to be an early shareholder in the French AI startup.) Dufourcq also added that he needs Mistral to generate €500 million in revenue in 2025 ($515 million at current exchange rates).
That would be a stark jump compared to 2024 revenue. According to multiple sources, Mistral only had tens of millions of euros in revenue in 2024.
There are other challenges ahead due to the fragmentation of the European market. Several attendees at the AI Action Summit were skeptical about other European countries’ willingness to bet on a French player.
Meanwhile, the Paris-based company also wants to control its destiny when it comes to infrastructure. Its CEO announced plans to invest “billions” in an AI data center. “We’re going to do our bit and invest several billion euros in a cluster, which will be set up in Essonne, so that we can train even more efficient systems in just a few months’ time,” Mensch said.
Details are still thin on this front. It’s unclear whether Mistral will work with a third-party partner to finance the data center or raise a new funding round to build one itself.
In the latter case, Mistral might draw inspiration from Cerebras, an American AI company specializing in fast inference that already works with Mistral to speed up the answers of its chatbot product, Le Chat.
The majority of Cerebras’ revenue currently comes from Emirati AI holding company G42. As competition heats up between the U.S. and China, Mistral might look for a third path, independent from big American tech companies and Chinese capital. Could that mean looking for money in the Middle East?
