French AI institute Mistral AI is in early talks to raise about 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion), Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing anonymous sources.
The funding round values the company at about 20 billion euros (about $23.15 billion), nearly double the valuation of 11.7 billion euros from its Series C funding round last September.
Mistral, one of Europe’s leading AI startups, was founded in 2023 with the stated ambition of “putting frontier AI in the hands of everyone.” The company has a more open approach to AI development compared to its US competitors, offering several basic large-scale language models with open weights, allowing anyone to customize them as they see fit.
The company also offers closed models tailored to use cases such as programming, voice cloning and generation, and optical character recognition.
Recently, as European countries have distanced themselves from American technology, Mistral has positioned itself as a friendlier, “sovereign” alternative to its own. The company has a data center near Paris and has partnerships with the French military, the Luxembourg government, and several major European companies.
Still, Mistral has only raised about $4 billion to date, according to Pitchbook, a fraction of what U.S. rivals OpenAI ($186 billion) and Anthropic ($161.25 billion) have raised. These labs are also rated much higher, reflecting how far ahead US labs are in revenue, model adoption, and corporate demand.
Mistral did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
