Mistral strengthens leadership in Europe’s AI sector with big funding

With a multi-billion dollar capital injection from the Dutch technology group ASML, the French company Mistral is cementing its leading position in Europe in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The new financing round now values ​​Mistral at €11.7 billion, the company announced on Tuesday. However, this is only a fraction of the $183 billion (approximately €156 billion) at which the US startup Anthropic was recently valued.

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For Mistral, however, the financial injection represents a doubling of the French company's value compared to the previous year. Of the total €1.7 billion in the new financing round, ASML is contributing €1.3 billion, securing an 11 percent stake in Mistral. ASML manufactures, among other things, machines that produce microchips required for AI. 

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Mistral's capital raise follows months of rumors that the company could be targeted for a takeover by US tech giant Apple, which has lagged behind other industry heavyweights in developing its own AI. However, Mistral said the latest funding round "reaffirms the company's independence."

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With its Le Chat program, Mistral operates a service similar to that of the US company OpenAI with ChatGPT. In Europe, Mistral is a leader in large language models (LLMs), but also offers the option of generating images or programming code. However, the French company is nowhere near the scale of OpenAI: According to reports, the US company is in negotiations to allow its employees to sell shares – at a valuation of $500 billion.

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The US company Anthropic, which competes with ChatGPT with its chatbot Claude, announced in early September that it had raised $13 billion in a financing round. This valued the AI ​​startup at $183 billion.

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