Free models include research models such as Mistral NeMo, which was built in collaboration with Nvidia that the startup open-sourced in July 2024.
How does Mistral AI make money?
While many of Mistral AI’s offerings are free or now have free tiers, Mistral AI plans to drive some revenue from Le Chat’s paid tiers. Introduced in February 2025, Le Chat’s Pro plan is priced at $14.99 a month.
On the purely B2B side, Mistral AI monetizes its premier models through APIs with usage-based pricing. Enterprises can also license these models, and the company likely also generates a significant share of its revenue from its strategic partnerships, some of which it highlighted during the Paris AI Summit.
Overall, however, Mistral AI’s revenue is reportedly still in the eight-digit range, according to multiple sources.
What partnerships has Mistral AI closed?
In 2024, Mistral AI entered a deal with Microsoft that included a strategic partnership for distributing its AI models through Microsoft’s Azure platform and a €15 million investment. The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) swiftly concluded that the deal didn’t qualify for investigation due to its small size. However, it also sparked some criticism in the EU.
In January 2025, Mistral AI signed a deal with press agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) to let Chat query the AFP’s entire text archive dating back to 1983.
Mistral AI also secured strategic partnerships with France’s army and job agency, shipping giant CMA, German defense tech startup Helsing, IBM, Orange, and Stellantis.
How much funding has Mistral AI raised to date?
As of February 2025, Mistral AI raised around €1 billion in capital to date, approximately $1.04 billion at the current exchange rate. This includes some debt financing, as well as several equity financing rounds raised in close succession.
In June 2023, and before it even released its first models, Mistral AI raised a record $112 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Sources at the time said the seed round — Europe’s largest ever — valued the then-one-month-old startup at $260 million.
Other investors in this seed round included Bpifrance, Eric Schmidt, Exor Ventures, First Minute Capital, Headline, JCDecaux Holding, La Famiglia, LocalGlobe, Motier Ventures, Rodolphe Saadé, Sofina, and Xavier Niel.
Only six months later, it closed a Series A of €385 million ($415 million at the time), at a reported valuation of $2 billion. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from existing backer Lightspeed, as well as BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, Conviction, Elad Gil, General Catalyst, and Salesforce.
The $16.3 million convertible investment that Microsoft made in Mistral AI as part of their partnership announced in February 2024 was presented as a Series A extension, implying an unchanged valuation.
In June 2024, Mistral AI then raised €600 million in a mix of equity and debt (around $640 million at the exchange rate at the time). The long-rumored round was led by General Catalyst at a $6 billion valuation, with notable investors, including Cisco, IBM, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, and others.
What could a Mistral AI exit look like?
Mistral is “not for sale,” Mensch said in January 2025 at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Of course, [an IPO is] the plan.”
This makes sense, given how much the startup has raised so far: Even a large sale may not provide high enough multiples for its investors, not to mention sovereignty concerns depending on the acquirer.
However, the only way to definitely squash persistent acquisition rumors is to scale its revenue to levels that could even remotely justify its nearly $6 billion valuation. Either way, stay tuned.
