Following the Trump directive that led Anthropic to pull its latest AI models offline and growing calls for sovereign tech that reduces reliance on the U.S., Mistral AI has been caught in a whirlwind of attention. But the French AI darling is often misunderstood, and the fact that it develops large language models (LLMs) has muddied the picture.
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Anyone who judges Mistral by how close it is to becoming ‘the OpenAI from Europe’ is in for disappointment. Its chat and agent Vibe, formerly Le Chat, only has an ounce of ChatGPT’s brand recognition, and Claude is more popular than Mistral’s models even among founders based at Station F, Paris’ startup campus.
On the other hand, casual observers tend to miss that the French decacorn is following the Palantir playbook, with forward-deployed engineers that help governments and large corporations adopt AI and tailor it for their use cases.
This approach is also better suited for Mistral’s means. While the company is rumored to be raising some $3.5 billion at a $23.15 billion valuation, nearly doubling its current valuation, that’s still far less than U.S. frontier labs. But its revenues have also ramped up; in February, it disclosed that its annual recurring revenue was now above $400 million, up from $20 million just one year earlier, and claimed it was on track to surpass $1 billion in ARR this year.
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This has helped Mistral gain a seat at the table in places like Davos, and even in rooms where tech CEOs have a hard time getting their message across, such as the French Parliament. Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch has become a public ambassador for a certain vision of AI, but he still has some evangelizing to do when it comes to explaining his own company.
In a lengthy LinkedIn post, Mensch broke down what the Paris-based company has been doing “for a living” — deploying its models and agent platform on the infrastructure of its Enterprise customers, and helping them build custom models with Forge, a platform that lets them use their own data for training.
However, misunderstandings and bigger hopes around Mistral don’t stem out of thin air. Named after a wind, the company pursues a grand vision. “We exist to make sure that everyone gets access to the best AI systems, outside of centralized control exercised by states or corporations that feel the need to control in-fine deployment of AI,” Mensch wrote.
Analysis
This vision means that Mistral is looking beyond the enterprise. It also aims to keep on making big investments into research to keep up with foundational AI rivals — and Mensch’s post also covered where he thinks the company stands in that regard.
“Today, we do not yet own the best language models, but we’ve constantly reduced that gap. We have a very exciting model to come this summer – it will be open-weight, and we’re opening early access to it in July. In domains that are less compute bound, e.g. voice, vision and document processing, we have state-of-the-art solutions,” Mensch claimed.
Mistral’s upcoming model has already generated some buzz on X, where Mensch and Mistral backer Marc Andreessen have engaged with jokes and amplified memes on what we now know won’t be called “Le Chaton Fat.” That’s another sign that the world — especially “the rest of the world” — is keeping an eye out for whatever Mistral has in its bag.
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