Mistral AI SAS () is a French artificial intelligence (AI) company, headquartered in Paris. Founded in 2023, it has open-weight large language models (LLMs), with both open-source and proprietary AI models. As of 2025 the company has a valuation of more than US$14 billion.
The company is named after the mistral, a powerful, cold wind in southern France, a term which originates from the Occitan language.
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; Lample and Lacroix, meanwhile, are large-scale AI models specialists who had worked for Meta Platforms.
The trio originally met during their studies at ÃÂcole Polytechnique.
In June 2023, the start-up carried out a first fundraising of â¬105 million ($117 million) with investors including the American fund Lightspeed Venture Partners, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel and JCDecaux. The valuation was then estimated by the Financial Times at â¬240 million ($267 million).
On 10 December 2023, Mistral AI announced that it had raised â¬385 million ($428 million) as part of its second fundraising. This round of financing involves the Californian fund Andreessen Horowitz, BNP Paribas and the software publisher Salesforce.
By December 2023, it was valued at over $2 billion.
On 16 April 2024, reporting revealed that Mistral was in talks to raise â¬500 million, a deal that would more than double its current valuation to at least â¬5 billion.
In June 2024, Mistral AI secured a â¬600 million ($645 million) funding round, increasing its valuation to â¬5.8 billion ($6.2 billion). Based on valuation, as of June 2024, the company was ranked fourth globally in the AI industry, and first outside the San Francisco Bay Area.
In August 2025, the Financial Times reported that Mistral was in talks to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. In September 2025, Bloomberg announced that Mistral AI has secured a â¬2 billion investment valuing it at â¬12 billion ($14 billion). This comes after $1.5 billion investment from Dutch company ASML, which owns 11% of Mistral.
On 26 February 2024, Microsoft announced that Mistral's language models would be made available on Microsoft's Azure cloud, while the multilingual conversational assistant Le Chat would be launched in the style of ChatGPT. The partnership also included a financial investment of $16 million by Microsoft in Mistral AI.
In April 2025, Mistral AI announced a â¬100 million partnership with the shipping company CMA CGM.
On 19 November, 2024, the company announced updates for Le Chat (pronounced in French, like the French word for "cat"). It added the ability to create images, using Black Forest Labs' Flux Pro model.
On 6 February 2025, Mistral AI released Le Chat on iOS 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.
The following table lists the main model versions of Mistral, describing the significant changes included with each version:
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.
Mistral AI claimed in 2023 that its model beat both LLaMA 70B, and GPT-3.5 in most benchmarks.
In March 2024, 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 OpenAI's GPT-4, Mixtral, Meta AI's LLaMA-2, and Anthropic's Claude 2 generated copyrighted text verbatim in 44%, 22%, 10%, and 8% of responses respectively.
On 17 March 2025, Mistral released Mistral Small 3.1 as a smaller, more efficient model.
On 7 May 2025, Mistral AI released Mistral Medium 3.
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.
On 2 December 2025, Mistral AI released Mistral Large 3, a sparse, mixture-of-experts model with 41 billion active parameters and 675 billion total parameters, and Ministral 3, three small, dense models with 3 billion, 7 billion and 14 billion parameters.
On 10 December 2025, Mistral AI released Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2. Devstral Small 2, a 24B parameter model is claimed to achieve better performance at coding than Qwen 3 Coder Flash model which is a 30B parameter model.
On 10 December 2025, Mistral released Mistral Vibe, a command line interface for AI-Assisted software development. This was initially released with the Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2 models available.