Mistral raises €3 billion Series D led by Samsung at over €21 billion valuation

Paris-based Mistral AI has closed a €3 billion Series D funding round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion, marking the largest equity fundraise ever completed by a European technology company.

Samsung Electronics led the round, with Scaleup Europe Fund (managed by EQT) and existing backer PSG Equity joining as co-leads. New investors in the round include Advent, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

“Who controls intelligence, and who can adapt it to their own needs, matters as much as how powerful it is. That’s why we built Mistral on open-weight models from day one, and why we’ve since expanded into infrastructure, products and deployment,” said Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO, Mistral.

Founded in 2023 by Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix, Mistral builds open-weight AI models and has become the strongest alternative to closed AI models. It aims to put frontier AI “in everyone’s hands” and make it open, customisable and cost-efficient for enterprises and governments across sectors such as finance, manufacturing, defence and energy. It currently operates in 20 countries and counts more than 125 global enterprises as customers, including Airbus, ASML and HSBC.

Mistral argues while the first wave of generative AI was dominated by a race to build the most capable model the first wave of generative AI was dominated by a race to build the most capable model, organisations and governments have shifted their focus to how to deploy AI for critical operations without ceding control of their infrastructure and intelligence to outside vendors.

It positions itself as the only AI company capable of answering that question by building the entire stack, open-weight models, the underlying infrastructure and compute, and the applications needed to put them into production to meet that demand.

At the centre of Mistral’s claim is its sovereign AI layer: a model of control across four dimensions, meaning data kept inside an organisation’s own boundaries, models that can be customised and controlled, private and predictable compute, and production systems that remain fully auditable.

The company says its open, full-stack approach lets enterprises adopt advanced AI without exposing sensitive data, workflows or institutional knowledge to third parties.

The Series D funding round comes just three years after Mistral’s launch and follows a €1.7 billion Series C round led by chipmaking equipment giant ASML in September 2025. It had announced a €722 million debt financing to support the development of its first large-scale data centre near Paris in March 2026.

A long list of existing backers, including a16z, ASML, Belfius, BNP Paribas CIB, Bpifrance, Carmignac, DST Global, Eurazeo, General Catalyst, Headline, Hillspire, Index Ventures, Korelya Capital, Lightspeed, Nvidia, Phoenix Court’s Solar fund and Salesforce Ventures participated in this round.

With the new funding, Mistral says it will be able to significantly expand its frontier research efforts, which it calls the foundation of its infrastructure, products and sovereignty push. The funds are also earmarked for scaling compute capacity for training more powerful models, expanding infrastructure more broadly, and accelerating the company’s commercial growth and international expansion.