What is Mistral AI? Everything to know about the OpenAI competitor
-
By
Matthew Terry
- May 6, 2025
- Comments
- 5 minutes read
- 95 Views
- 2 months ago
Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its $6 billion valuation, its global market share is still relatively low.
However, the recent launch of its chat assistant on mobile app stores was met with some hype, particularly in its home country. “Go and download Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI — or something else,” French president Emmanuel Macron said in a TV interview ahead of the AI Action Summit in Paris.
While this wave of attention may be encouraging, Mistral AI still faces challenges in competing with the likes of OpenAI — and in doing so while keeping up with its self-definition as “the world’s greenest and leading independent AI lab.”
What is Mistral AI?
Mistral AI has raised significant amounts of funding since its creation in 2023 with the ambition to “put frontier AI in the hands of everyone.” While this isn’t a direct jab at OpenAI, the slogan is meant to highlight the company’s advocacy for openness in AI.
Its alternative to ChatGPT, chat assistant Le Chat, is now also available on iOS and Android. It reached 1 million downloads in the two weeks following its mobile release, even grabbing France’s top spot for free downloads on the iOS App Store.
This comes in addition to Mistral AI’s suite of models, which includes:
In March 2025, the company introduced Mistral OCR, an optical character recognition (OCR) API that can turn any PDF into a text file to make it easier for AI models to ingest.
Techcrunch event
Berkeley, CA
|
June 5
BOOK NOW
Who are Mistral AI’s founders?
Mistral AI’s three founders share a background in AI research at major U.S. tech companies with significant operations in Paris. CEO Arthur Mensch used to work at Google’s DeepMind, while CTO Timothée Lacroix and chief scientist officer Guillaume Lample are former Meta staffers.
Co-founding advisers also include Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (also a board member) and Charles Gorintin from health insurance startup Alan, as well as former digital minister Cédric O, which caused controversy due to his previous role.
Are Mistral AI’s models open source?
Not all of them. Mistral AI differentiates its premier models, whose weights are not available for commercial purposes, from its free models, for which it provides weight access under the Apache 2.0 license.
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.
