Mistral said it raised €3 billion in Series D funding

Mistral said it raised €3 billion in Series D funding and now is valued at €21 billion, or about $24.4 billion.

The company said the funding, led by Samsung, will expand its frontier research and scale its compute capacity. Mistral is moving more into data centers. Mistral also said it will its commercial and international reach.

Airbus, ASML and HSBC are Mistral customers and the AI lab has more than 125 global enterprises in the fold. Mistral's Series C round was led by ASML and Series D was led by Samsung along with Blackrock and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

Mistral has become a key player as sovereign AI becomes a big priority. The company is offering a full-AI stack with a focus on open-weight models combined with compute capacity and surrounding customers and a pledge that customers are "never locked into a single vendor's roadmap, pricing or availability."

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Recent moves from Mistral include adding third party models to its platform, launching Shieldstral, expanding a partnership with Microsoft, Databricks as well as Accenture. Mistal AI also acquired Koyeb earlier this year to ramp Mistral Compute.

In a blog post, Mistral said:

"During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model. Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop. Demand for that combination of performance with control, choice and independence is growing internationally, as enterprises and governments weigh the long-term technology dependencies, data governance requirements and deployment choices that come with any AI investment."

Earlier this year, Cohere said it will acquire Aleph Alpha to focus on sovereign AI.

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