Mistral AI raises €3bn in Series D at valuation above €21bn, nearly double last year's €11.7bn

Samsung Electronics led the Series D, with the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund and existing investor PSG Equity as co-leads. New investors include Advent, funds managed by BlackRock and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Returning backers include ASML, Nvidia and Salesforce. Chief executive Arthur Mensch said the round lets the company "move faster on R&D, products, infrastructure and keep giving organisations the ability to run AI at scale, on their own terms".

Why the round matters

Mistral described the round as the largest equity fundraising by a European technology company. The European Commission is among the Scaleup Europe Fund's investors.

Mistral remains far smaller than OpenAI and Anthropic, which have raised far larger sums, and it faces growing competition from Chinese developers of open-weight models. Mistral pitches itself as a European alternative whose models customers can run on their own infrastructure.

ASML's stake and the Samsung tie-up

ASML led the previous round, putting in €1.3bn for an 11% stake in September 2025 at a valuation of €11.7bn. At the new valuation that stake would be worth roughly €2.3bn on paper.

The two signed a long-term collaboration agreement covering AI across ASML's product portfolio, from lithography system design to manufacturing operations. Mensch said the Samsung arrangement would focus on a similar area: integrating AI into manufacturing.

The valuation, in context

Mistral was valued at €5.8bn at its Series B in June 2024, so the new figure is more than three times that level. Including the new round, its total equity and debt financing comes to roughly €6.5bn, Tech Funding News reported.

The company says it operates in 20 countries and supports more than 125 enterprise customers, including Airbus, ASML and HSBC. It expects annual recurring revenue to exceed $1bn this year. Mensch told CNBC he expects to beat that figure "if everything happens as they are trending", without giving a revised number. That is a company forecast, not audited revenue.

What the capital buys

Mistral said the money will fund frontier research, training compute, infrastructure and international expansion. It plans up to 200 megawatts of capacity by 2027, on the way to 1 gigawatt by 2030.

It raised $830m in debt in March 2026 for data centre expansion and has committed €1.2bn to a buildout in Sweden, its first major infrastructure expansion outside France, expected to start operating in 2027. Mensch told CNBC the amount of compute Mistral owns will grow by around 100% over the next five years. In July it signed a deal with Microsoft to supply AI computing capacity while offering Mistral models to the US company's clients.

What comes next

Chief financial officer Johan Bergqvist told AFP the company wants to expand across Europe, where it is strongest, and in the Middle East, Asia and North America. Mensch said models due "very soon" would be "very competitive", without giving a date, and that the company plans to train "bigger and faster models".