Mistral AI
Mistral AI is a French AI developer founded in April 2023. Its three founders lead the company: Arthur Mensch as CEO, Guillaume Lample as Chief Science Officer and Timothée Lacroix as CTO. Its registered office is in Paris.
Company & leadership
- CEO
- Arthur Mensch
- Registered office
- 15 rue des Halles, 75001 Paris, France
- Company form
- French joint-stock company; registration 952 418 325
Founders
- Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix
Founders and early growth
Mistral dates its first employee to 5 June 2023 and its seed round to 13 June. It released Mistral 7B on 27 September that year. The company timeline then records Mistral Large in February 2024 and its hundredth employee in September 2024.
Funding and ownership
On 9 September 2025, Mistral announced a €1.7 billion Series C at an €11.7 billion post-money valuation. ASML led the round. Other participants included DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Lightspeed and NVIDIA. These figures describe that financing event, not a current market valuation.
ASML separately disclosed a €1.3 billion investment and an approximately 11% fully diluted stake. It also gained an advisory seat on Mistral’s Strategic Committee, assigned to ASML CFO Roger Dassen. The agreement covered joint work on ASML products, research and operations.
Expansion beyond language models
Mistral’s timeline records OCR in March 2025, Compute in June, Voxtral in July and Studio in October. Forge followed in March 2026. These milestones show the company expanding from model releases into document processing, speech, infrastructure and development tools.
The current commercial terms identify Mistral AI, or the affiliate named in an order form, as the product supplier. The legal entity and the downloadable model license answer different questions: who provides the service and what rights apply to the weights.