Mistral gets into business

Hundreds of heads of state, technology CEO and non -profit organizations flocked to Paris for Summit of the action of artificial intelligence. So far, the winner of the diplomatic and business parade this week seems to be Mistral. In business jargon, we would say that the French unicorn of AI is experiencing rear winds.

Mistral was one of the main artificial intelligence companies in Europe. Originally, he published an impressive Open weight models And on the back of great interest in large-language models, the generative AI and its open-source approach, it has managed to collect more than a billion dollars in a very short time.

However, its influence has faded in recent months – especially because of what has happened with LLM startups through the ponds.

Openai collected a large total of $ 18 billion – and could soon resume 40 billion dollars more – While Anthropic has obtained about $ 8 billion. At the same time, Chinese competitors and Deepseek have published open models that work better than Mistral models.

Mistral could not outperform the competitors in depth or also complimentary. But the top of the AI ​​action came at the right time to change the story around the French startup.

Now Mistral becomes serious about business.

“We went from a scientific company focused on the manufacture of the strongest models for laptops at the time, to a company that now provides solutions to companies, which makes personalized applications, which provides knowledge, a Productivity to workers, ”Mistral’s the co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said at the summit.

Last week, the company Taken the cat out On iOS and Android, its assistant AI designed for consumers and corporate customers. And this week, he seems to benefit from an unprecedented support campaign of the main political decision -makers in France.

“Go download the cat, which is made by Mistral, rather than by Chatgpt by Openai or something else,” said French president Emmanuel Macron in a television interview on Sunday evening. “We want them to invest in France and develop partnerships. When you download it, you help a European champion, a French champion. You create jobs here, but you also make them stronger. And that’s what sovereignty is. »»

The cat is currently the most downloaded iOS application in France. However, the application does not really take off on other European markets. He is currently tanké # 66 Germany, and he is not even listed in the 100 best applications in Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom

Focus renewed on the business market

But Mistral does not bet his business on the success of consumers: for the moment, he expects to earn money from corporate customers, and partly the event in Paris has become a showcase to speak The way it happens on this front.

“We have associated ourselves with France work [the national employment agency]. They now use our technologies to facilitate research and access job lists, “said Mensch in a Television interview With TF1 on Sunday. “We also associated ourselves with Veolia to improve the efficiency of their [wastewater] Plants … so that they can understand what is going on in their plants at any time. »»

At the AI ​​action summit, John Elkann, president of Stelllantis, also announced a large agreement with Mistral. “We are already doing a lot of things together in our own internal organization,” said Elkann.

At the end of the year, the automaker behind the Peugeot, Citroën, Fiat and Jeep brands will update its mobile application to include the owner’s manual with an AI assistant fed by Mistral. Ideally, this is a first step in a larger relationship.

“As we advance, we believe that drivers will ask for information and control the vehicle via artificial intelligence, through connections with the web, but also integrated devices that work on the edge, which are much more effective, which are a very low latency, which can be controlled by voice, “said Mensch.

Mistral said it was also Partnership with HelsingA European defense company working on strike drones and electronic components in European fighter planes. In this case, Mistral works on new “visual action models” which will probably work on Edge devices.

At least for the moment, the company has a few AS in its round in terms of what it is able to provide these corporate customers.

Mistral allows you to deploy the cat in your environment with personalized models and a personalized user interface. If you work in defense or in bank, you may need to be able to deploy an AI assistant on the premise. It is not currently possible with Chatgpt Enterprise or Claude Enterprise.

Mistral also offers its frontier models via an API that developers can use in their own applications.

With the Helsing partnership in particular, Mistral proves that it is important to have an AI European champion. Now let’s see if Mistral can convince other European countries that they could also count on a European supplier.

“Mistral is the chance of Europe and we have only one chance. Everyone has to work with Mistral, ”said Nicolas Dufourcq, CEO of Bpifrance. (Bpifrance is also found to be an early shareholder of the French AI startup.) Dufourcq also added that he needed mistral to generate 500 million euros in revenues in 2025 ($ 515 million at current exchange rates ).

It would be a brutal jump compared to the revenues of 2024. According to several sources, Mistral had only tens of millions of euros in revenue in 2024.

There are other challenges to come due to the fragmentation of the European market. Several participants at the AI ​​action summit were skeptical about the will of other European countries to bet on a French player.

Meanwhile, the company based in Paris also wants to control its destiny with regard to infrastructure. Its CEO has announced its intention to invest “billions” in an AI data center. “We are going to do our part and invest several billion euros in a cluster, which will be set up in Essonne, so that we can train even more effective systems in a few months,” said Mensch.

The details are still thin on this front. We do not know if Mistral will work with a third party partner to finance the data center or lift a new financing round to build one itself.

In the latter case, Mistral could draw inspiration from BrainAn American AI company specializing in rapid inference that already works with Mistral to speed up the responses of its Chatbot product, the cat.

The majority of Cerebras’ revenues currently come from the Emirati AI G42 portfolio company. While competition is warmed between the United States and China, Mistral could seek a third path, independent of large American technological companies and Chinese capital. Could this mean looking for money in the Middle East?

Read our full coverage From the top of the action of artificial intelligence in Paris.