Mistral Raises €3 Billion in Samsung-Led Series D at More Than €21 Billion Valuation
French AI lab Mistral closed a €3 billion Series D at a post-money valuation above €21 billion, led by Samsung Electronics with EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity as co-leads. The company will expand frontier research, compute and infrastructure while operating in 20 countries and serving more than 125 enterprises. Mistral is pitching full-stack open-weight models as sovereign AI for governments and corporations seeking control over data.
French AI company Mistral announced that it has raised €3 billion in a Series D funding round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion, which it described as the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company, three years after the company’s launch. Samsung Electronics led the round, joined by co-leads Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity. The round is about $3.58 billion at a valuation of about $24.39 billion. Mistral said the round reflects a strategic endorsement from investors across Europe, Asia and North America and brings together strategic and financial investors, including global technology leaders, growth investors and existing shareholders. Mistral said the capital will significantly expand its frontier research, scale compute capacity for training powerful models, expand infrastructure, and accelerate commercial growth and its international footprint. The company now operates across 20 countries and supports more than 125 global enterprises’ mission-critical AI transformation, including Airbus, ASML, and HSBC. Mistral is pushing to build 1 GW of compute capacity in Europe by 2030. In August, it unveiled tools that let customers choose which regions their AI queries are processed in, and it has started hosting third-party open-weight AI models, including Chinese models. Mistral said that during the first wave of generative AI the central question was who could build the most powerful model, and that organizations and governments now ask how to harness AI for mission-critical needs without surrendering control over infrastructure and the intelligence loop. The company said it is building the full stack of open-weight models, the infrastructure and compute they run on, and the products that bring them into production, which it describes as a sovereign AI layer in which data stays inside an organization’s boundaries, models are controllable and customizable, compute is private and predictable, and systems in production are fully controllable and auditable. French president Macron said the round reflected France and South Korea’s goal of "building a third way in AI." With a Series C led by ASML and a Series D led by Samsung Electronics, Mistral has attracted backing from companies at the forefront of advanced manufacturing, engineering and industrial technology.