Artificial intelligence startup Mistral released a new model suite on Tuesday to keep pace with major AI labs. googleOpenAI and DeepSeek.
The French company’s announcement follows model releases from the likes of DeepSeek and Google in recent weeks, as AI labs around the world struggle to stay at the forefront of research while also building commercial operations.
Mistral’s release includes a larger model that it claims is “the world’s best free-weight multimodal and multilingual.” It also announced the release of a smaller model that the company claims can be used in robotics, devices, and drones.
Founded in 2023, Mistral has emerged as one of Europe’s leading AI companies and raised a €1.7 billion funding round in September. Dutch chip equipment manufacturer ASML We will contribute 1.3 billion euros of the amount raised, Nvidia are also participating.
This round focused on previously supported startups. microsoft and Andreessen Horowitz – valued at 11.7 billion euros.
“Mistral 3 sets a new standard for global availability of AI and unlocks new possibilities for enterprises,” the company said in a statement.
“This suite of models further extends our customers’ applied AI capabilities to robotics, autonomous drones, small on-device applications that don’t require network access, and even the world’s largest enterprise agent workflows.”
Mistral’s new larger model offers powerful agent capabilities and is designed for AI assistants, search enhancement systems, scientific workloads, and complex enterprise workflows, the company said.
The startup’s new compact model, called Ministral 3, is small enough to run on drones, cars, robots, phones, and laptops.
“Smaller models offer benefits for most real-world applications, including lower inference costs, lower latency, and domain-specific performance,” Mistral said. “It outperforms larger models in certain workflows and can be customized to reach state-of-the-art performance at its size.”
Ministral 3 can be deployed on a single graphics processing unit (GPU), which reduces running costs and speeds up iterations, the company says.
“The next chapter in AI is not just bigger, it’s smarter, faster, and open,” the company said. “Together, we are building for the era of distributed intelligence.”
The latest release comes as Mistral looks to ramp up its commercial activity to justify its nearly €12 billion price tag.
In addition to the deal announced Monday with HSBC that gives the multinational bank access to models for work ranging from financial analysis to translation, Mistral has signed deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with several companies.
The startup is also increasingly focused on M&A as it accelerates its growth. Mistral is considered a leading domestic company in Europe’s AI field, but its strength pales in comparison to its American rivals, which are increasing their presence on the continent.
Anthropic, which announced a $13 billion raise at a $183 billion valuation in September, and OpenAI, which reportedly sold secondary stakes in October with a $500 billion price tag, both announced they would open new offices in Europe in 2025.
