Mistral AI SAS () is a French

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

(AI)

startup A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to ...

, headquartered in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

. Founded in 2023, it specializes in open-weight

large language model A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation. The largest and most capable LLMs are g ...

s (LLMs), with both open-source and proprietary AI models.

Namesake

The company is named after the mistral, a powerful, cold wind in southern France.

History

Mistral AI was established in April 2023 by three French AI researchers, Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix. Mensch, an expert in advanced AI systems, is a former employee of

Google DeepMind DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British–American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Goo ...

; Lample and Lacroix, meanwhile, are large-scale AI models specialists who had worked for

Meta Platforms Meta Platforms, Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Meta owns and operates several prominent social media platforms and communication services, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads ...

. The trio originally met during their studies at

École Polytechnique (, ; also known as Polytechnique or l'X ) is a ''grande école'' located in Palaiseau, France. It specializes in science and engineering and is a founding member of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris. The school was founded in 1794 by mat ...

Company operation

Funding

In June 2023, the start-up carried out a first fundraising of €105 million ($117 million) with investors including the American fund

Lightspeed Venture Partners Lightspeed Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm focusing on seed stage, early stage investments and growth stage investments in the enterprise, fintech, consumer and healthcare sectors. Lightspeed has eleven offices globally and as o ...

Eric Schmidt Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and former computer engineer who was the chief executive officer of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's chairman, executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. He also was the ...

, Xavier Niel and JCDecaux. The valuation is then estimated by the

Financial Times The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and also published digitally that focuses on business and economic Current affairs (news format), current affairs. Based in London, the paper is owned by a Jap ...

at €240 million ($267 million). On 10 December 2023, Mistral AI announced that it had raised €385 million ($428 million) as part of its second fundraising. This round of financing involves the Californian fund

Andreessen Horowitz AH Capital Management, LLC (commonly known as Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z) is an American privately held venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of M ...

BNP Paribas BNP Paribas (; sometimes referred to as BNPP or BNP) is a French multinational universal bank and financial services holding company headquartered in Paris. It was founded in 2000 from the merger of two of France's foremost financial instituti ...

and the software publisher

Salesforce Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and ap ...

. In October 2023, Mistral AI raised €385 million. By December 2023, it was valued at over $2 billion. On 16 April 2024, reporting revealed that Mistral was in talks to raise €500 million, a deal that would more than double its current valuation to at least €5 billion. In June 2024, Mistral AI secured a €600 million ($645 million) funding round, elevating its valuation to €5.8 billion ($6.2 billion). Led by venture capital firm General Catalyst, this round resulted in additional contributions from existing investors. The funds aim to support the company's expansion. Based on valuation, the company is currently in fourth place in the global AI race and in first place outside the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a List of regions of California, region of California surrounding and including San Francisco Bay, and anchored by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose, California, S ...

, ahead of several of its peers, such as Cohere,

Hugging Face Hugging Face, Inc. is a French-American company based in List of tech companies in the New York metropolitan area, New York City that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning. It is most notable for its Transf ...

Inflection In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...

and Perplexity.

Partnership with Microsoft

On 26 February 2024,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

announced a new partnership with the company to expand its presence in the

industry. Under the agreement, Mistral's language models will be available on Microsoft's Azure cloud, while the multilingual conversational assistant ''Le Chat'' will be launched in the style of

ChatGPT ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released on November 30, 2022. It uses large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o as well as other Multimodal learning, multimodal models to create human-like re ...

. The partnership also included a financial investment of $16 million by Microsoft in Mistral AI.

Services

On November 19, 2024, the company announced updates for ''Le Chat'' (pronounced in French). It added the ability to create images, using Black Forest Labs' Flux Pro model. On February 6, 2025, Mistral AI released ''Le Chat'' on

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

and Android mobile devices. Mistral AI also introduced a Pro subscription tier, priced at $14.99 per month, which provides access to more advanced models, unlimited messaging, and web browsing.

Models

The following table lists the main model versions of Mistral, describing the significant changes included with each version:

Mistral 7B

Mistral AI claimed in the Mistral 7B release blog post that the model outperforms LLaMA 2 13B on all benchmarks tested, and is on par with LLaMA 34B on many benchmarks tested, despite having only 7 billion parameters, a small size compared to its competitors.

Mixtral 8x7B

Mistral AI's testing in 2023 shows the model beats both LLaMA 70B, and GPT-3.5 in most benchmarks. In March 2024, a research conducted by Patronus AI comparing performance of LLMs on a 100-question test with prompts to generate text from books protected under U.S. copyright law found that Open AI's

GPT-4 Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a multimodal large language model trained and created by OpenAI and the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models. It was launched on March 14, 2023, and made publicly available via the p ...

, Mixtral, Meta AI's LLaMA-2, and Anthropic's Claude 2 generated copyrighted text verbatim in 44%, 22%, 10%, and 8% of responses respectively.

Mistral Small 3.1

On 17 March 2025, Mistral released Mistral Small 3.1 as a smaller, more efficient model.

Mistral Medium 3

On 7 May 2025, Mistral AI released Mistral Medium 3.

Magistral Small and Magistral Medium

On 10 June 2025, Mistral AI released their first AI reasoning models: Magistral Small (open-source), and Magistral Medium, models which are purported to have chain-of-thought capabilities.

References

External links

*
Mistral AI
on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

{{Generative AI Artificial intelligence laboratories French companies established in 2023 Companies based in Paris Open-source artificial intelligence 2023 in artificial intelligence