Europe’s largest AI developer Mistral has raised €3 billion ($3.5 billion) in a Series D round led by Samsung Electronics, giving it a €21 billion valuation and a boost in its struggle to keep up with global frontier labs.
The French company announced the raise on Tuesday, touting it as the largest ever for a European tech startup, and said it would help it “significantly expand” its frontier research into open models.
CEO Arthur Mensch said: “Three years ago, we started Mistral with a simple belief that organisations should not have to choose between frontier AI performance and control over how that technology is deployed. Who controls intelligence, and who can adapt it to their own needs, matters as much as how powerful it is."
Mistral, which last launched a major large model in December 2025, said funding would go towards research, scaling its compute capacity for training models, and growing its international footprint.
