Mistral is on business

Hundreds of state chiefs, tech CEOs and nonprofits flocked to Paris Artificial Intelligence Action Summit. So far, the winners of this week’s diplomacy and business parade are Mistral. At Business Lingo, it can be said that French AI unicorns are experiencing a tailwind.

Mistral is one of the leading artificial intelligence companies in Europe. Originally, it released some impressive ones Open weight model Also, there is a lot of interest in large-scale language models, generation AI, and its open source approaches, allowing us to raise over $1 billion in just a few minutes.

But the effects have faded over the past few months – especially because of what’s happening at LLM startups across the pond.

Openai raised a total of $18 billion – and may pick it up soon Another $40 billion – Humanity has secured around $8 billion. At the same time, Chinese competitors like Deepseek have released open weight models that perform better than Mistral’s models.

Mistral couldn’t outperform DeepSeek or Autouse American’s competitors. However, the AI ​​Action Summit has come at the right time to change the narrative about French startups.

Mistral is currently taking business seriously.

“From a science company focused on creating the strongest models of laptops back then, to a company that currently provides solutions to businesses, to a company that is creating custom applications – the workers, knowledge, productivity “We bring about this,” Mistral’s co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said at the summit.

Last week, the company Le Chat has been released On iOS and Android, AI assistants are designed for both consumers and enterprise clients. And it appears this week that it will benefit from an unprecedented support campaign from top French policymakers.

French President Emmanuel Macron said in a television interview on Sunday evening, “Download and download Le Chat created by Mistral, not ChatGpt by Openai and others. “We invested in France and We want you to develop a partnership. When you download it, you are helping the European champion, the French champion. Here you are creating jobs, but you are becoming stronger. And it is rightful It’s all about.

Le Chat is currently the most downloaded iOS app in France. However, the app has not actually taken off in other European markets. Currently, it is German tank #66 and is not listed in the top 100 apps in Spain, Italy and the UK.

Focused on the enterprise market

However, Mistral has not bet the company on consumer success. At the moment, there is a hope of making money from corporate customers, and some of the events in Paris have been transformed into a showcase to talk about how Mistral is doing in that respect.

“We are partnering with France Travile (National Employment Agency), who now use our technology to make it easier for job seekers to find their job listings,” Mensch said It says as follows. TV interview On Sunday at TF1. “We have also partnered with Veolia to improve the efficiency of (wastewater) plants.

At the AI ​​Action Summit, Stellantis Chairman John Elkann also announced a wide range of contracts with Mistral. “We’ve already done a lot of things together already within our own internal organization,” Elkan said.

By the end of the year, the automakers behind the Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat and Jeep brands will update their mobile apps to replace owner manuals with mistral-driven AI assistants. Ideally, this is the first step in a larger relationship.

“As we move forward, drivers will request information and control the vehicle via artificial intelligence, not just through connections to the web, but also more efficient, more efficient, and embedded devices. I think that’s what I’m saying. It’s a very low latency that can be controlled by your voice,” Mensch said.

Mistral said that too. Partnership with Helsinga European defense company working on strike drones and electronic components for European fighter jets. In that case, Mistral is working on a new “vision language action model” that is likely to run on Edge devices.

For now, at least, the company has some aces on its sleeve in terms of what it can offer these enterprise customers.

Mistral allows you to deploy LE chats in your environment using custom models and custom user interfaces. If you are working in defense or banking, you may need to be able to deploy AI assistants on the premise. This is currently not possible with ChatGpt Enterprise or Claude Enterprise.

Mistral also offers frontier models via APIs that developers can use in their own applications.

In particular, with the Helsing Partnership, Mistral has proven that it is important to have a European AI champion. Now let’s see if Mistral can convince other European countries that they can also rely on European providers.

“Mistral is a European opportunity, and we have only one opportunity,” said Nicolas Dufourcq, CEO of Bpifrance. (BPIFRANCE is also an early shareholder of a French AI startup. ) Dufourcq added that Mistral is needed to generate 500 million euros of revenue in 2025 ($515 million at current exchange rates).

This is a tough jump compared to 2024 revenue. According to multiple sources, Mistral only earned tens of millions of euros in 2024.

Other challenges arise from fragmentation of the European market. Several participants in the AI ​​Action Summit were skeptical of the willingness of other European countries to wager on French players.

Meanwhile, the Paris-based company wants to control its fate as well when it comes to infrastructure. The CEO has announced plans to invest “billions” in AI data centers. “We will do bits and invest billions of euros in the cluster so that we can train more efficient systems in a few months.

Details are still weak on this side. It is unclear whether Mistral will work with third-party partners to fund the data center or raise a new funding round to build itself.

In the latter case, mistrals may draw inspiration brainan American AI company already working with Mistral to focus on rapid inference that speeds up the answers of chatbot products.

The majority of Cerebras’ revenues now come from the Emirati AI Holding Company G42. As competition grows between the US and China, Mistral may look for a third path to independence from the large American corporations and the Chinese capital. Does that mean looking for money in the Middle East?