Hundreds of states, technology CEOs and heads of nonprofits flocked to Paris to attend the AI Action Summit. So far, the winner of this week's diplomatic and commercial parade seems to be Mistral. In business terms, we are going to say that the French artificial intelligence unicorn is experiencing a tailwind.
Mistral has been one of the leading artificial intelligence companies in Europe. Initially, it released some impressive open models and after a lot of interest in large language models, generating AI and its open source approach, it managed to raise over $1 billion in very little time.
But, over the past few months, its influence has been vanishing - especially because of what happened to LLM startups in the pond.
Openai has raised a huge sum of $18 billion in total - which may soon be an increase of $40 billion - while humans have received about $8 billion in bonuses. Meanwhile, Chinese competitors like DeepSeek have released open models that are better than the Mistral model.
Mistral cannot beat DeepSeek or surpass American competitors. But the AI Action Summit has already changed the narrative of French startups at the right time.
Now, Mistral is taking the business seriously.
“We have transformed from a science company focused on laptop models at the time to a company that is providing solutions for businesses, which is making custom applications that bring knowledge, productivity to workers,” Mismtral's co-founder Arthur Mensch, and CEO, said at the summit.
Last week, the company released LE CHAT on iOS and Android, with its AI assistant designed for consumers and enterprise customers. This week, it appears to benefit from an unprecedented support campaign by France’s top decision makers.
French President Emmanuel Macron said in a TV interview on Sunday night: “Go to download the le chat made by Mistral, not by Openai or other chats. "We want them to invest in France and build partnerships. When you download it, you will help the European champions of the French champions. You are creating jobs here, but you can also make them stronger. That's all about sovereignty."
LE Chat is currently the most downloaded iOS app in France. However, the app hasn't really taken off in other European markets. It is currently #66 German tank and is not even listed in the top 100 apps in Spain, Italy and the UK
But Mistral has not bet on the company's success: So far, it hopes to make money from corporate clients, partly because the Paris event turned into a display of Mistral to talk about its performance in that regard.
"We have worked with Travail, France (National Employment Agency). Now they use our technology to make it easier for job seekers to find and access job lists," Mensch said in a TV interview with TF1 on Sunday. “We also worked with Willia to improve the efficiency of its (wastewater) plants… so that they can understand what’s going on in their plants at any given moment.”
At the AI Action Summit, Strantis Chairman John Elkann also announced an extensive deal with Mistral. “We’ve actually done a lot together in our own internal organisation,” Elken said.
By the end of this year, the automakers behind Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat and Jeep brands will update their mobile apps to include replacing the owner's manual with a criminal-powered AI assistant. Ideally, this is the first step toward a greater relationship.
“As we move forward, we believe that drivers will ask for information and control vehicles through devices connected to the network and through devices that are embedded at the edge, which are more efficient and very low Delay can be controlled by sound,” Menshi said.
Mistral said it also works with Helsing, a European defense company engaged in strike drones and electronic components for Eurofighters. In this case, Mistral is developing a new "visual language action model" that may run on edge devices.
At least for now, the company is able to offer several ACE sleeves to what these corporate customers are doing.
Mistral allows you to deploy LE CHAT in your environment using custom models and custom user interfaces. If you work in defense or banking, you may need to be able to deploy an AI assistant on the premise. Chatgpt Enterprise or Claude Enterprise is currently unavailable.
Mistral also provides its cutting-edge model through an API that developers can use in their own applications.
The Hulls Partnership in particular, Mistral proves that it is important to have a European AI champion. Now, let's see if Mistral can convince other European countries to rely on European providers as well.
"Mirstral is an opportunity in Europe, we only have one opportunity. Everyone has to work with Mistral," said Nicolas Dufourcq, CEO of Bpifrance. (Bpifrance also happens to be an early shareholder of French AI startups.) Dufourcq also added that he needs Mistral to earn 500 million euros in revenue in 2025 (in current exchange rates).
This will be a clear jump compared to revenue in 2024. According to multiple sources, Mistral only has tens of millions of euros in revenue in 2024.
Due to the dispersion of European markets, there are other challenges. Several participants at the AI Action Summit were skeptical of other European countries' willingness to bet on French players.
Meanwhile, the Paris-based company also wants to control the fate of its infrastructure. Its CEO announced plans to invest “billions of dollars” in AI data centers. "We will invest billions of euros in a cluster that will be built in Essonne so that we can train more efficient systems in just a few months," Mensch said.
Details are still thin in this regard. It is unclear whether Mistral will work with third-party partners to provide funding for data centers or raise new funds to build its own funds.
In the latter case, Mistral may draw inspiration from American AI company Cerebras, which specializes in rapid reasoning, which has partnered with Mistral to speed up the answers of its chatbot product, Le Chat.
Currently, most of the brain's revenue comes from UAE AI holding company G42. As competition between the United States and China surges, Mistral may look for a third path independent of the large American technology companies and Chinese capital. Could this mean looking for money in the Middle East?