Samsung-Led Mistral AI Completes $3.3 Billion Funding, Valuation Tops $24 Billion as Europe's AI Arms Race Escalates

TradingKey - On September 7, Eastern Time, French artificial intelligence company Mistral AI announced the completion of a €3 billion (approximately $3.3 billion) Series D funding round, pushing its post-money valuation above $24 billion. Mistral stated that this is the largest equity financing for a European tech company to date.

The funding round was led by Samsung Electronics, and co-led by the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund and existing investor PSG Equity. Advent, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg joined as new investors, while ASML (ASML), Nvidia (NVDA), a16z, Salesforce Ventures, and other existing investors continued to participate.

Mistral's valuation has grown by approximately 80% within a year. In September 2025, the company completed a €1.7 billion Series C funding round led by ASML, reaching a post-money valuation of €11.7 billion.

Samsung is a new investor in Mistral and served as the lead investor for this round. Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch stated that Samsung plans to leverage Mistral's AI technology to improve its chip manufacturing systems.

Previously, Mistral had already engaged in AI collaboration with ASML in areas such as R&D, engineering, and operations. Following the completion of this funding round, Samsung, ASML, and Nvidia have all become investors in Mistral.

The new funds will primarily be used for frontier AI research, expanding computing power and infrastructure, as well as commercialization and international market expansion. Mistral is stepping up the construction of its proprietary compute capacity and plans to build up to 1 GW of computing capacity in Europe by 2030.

In terms of commercialization, Mistral currently operates in 20 countries and serves over 125 global enterprise clients, including Airbus, ASML, and HSBC. The company's ARR surpassed $400 million in February this year, and Mistral CFO Johan Bergqvist recently stated that the company is on track to reach $1 billion in ARR by the end of 2026.

Meanwhile, Mistral continues to emphasize "sovereign AI" and open-weight models, aiming to give enterprise and government clients greater control over data, models, and computing infrastructure.

After securing investments from tech and semiconductor companies such as Samsung, ASML, and Nvidia, the company is expanding its model R&D, computing power, and enterprise business simultaneously. Whether its valuation of over $24 billion can be supported by sustained revenue growth will depend on whether newly added compute capacity and enterprise clients can be further converted into commercial revenue.

About Mistral AI

Mistral AI was co-founded in 2023 by former Google DeepMind and Meta AI researchers Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix. Headquartered in Paris, France, it is one of Europe's major foundation model developers.

Open-weight models represent one of Mistral's key technical routes, with the company emphasizing control over models, data, and computing infrastructure for enterprise and government clients. Its Mistral Large series has been updated to Mistral Large 3, which was released as an open-weight model.

Mistral is also one of the few European players capable of competing with leading U.S. AI companies in the foundation model and enterprise AI markets.