Backed by substantial funding and strategic partnerships, Mistral AI is developing a range of AI models and applications, including the Le Chat chatbot.

“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 in February 2025.

the company’s valuation has soared to €11.7 billion (approximately $13.8 billion) after a Series C funding round led by ASML,a Dutch semiconductor company,which invested €1.3 billion (approximately $1.5 billion) in September. This investment is coupled with a strategic partnership.

ASML’s interest highlights Mistral’s growing importance. while Mistral AI positions itself as “the world’s greenest and leading self-reliant AI lab,” it is striving to increase its recognition alongside its major competitors.

What is mistral AI?

“Go and download Le chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI – or something else.”

Mistral AI, founded in 2023, aims to “put frontier AI in the hands of everyone” by offering both open-source and proprietary AI models. This approach contrasts with the closed-source direction taken by OpenAI in some of its recent developments.

Le Chat, Mistral’s chatbot, is available on iOS and Android, quickly gaining popularity and reaching 1 million downloads within two weeks of its mobile release. It even topped the free downloads chart on the iOS App Store in France.

In July 2025, Le Chat received a significant update, incorporating features like a “deep research” mode, multilingual reasoning, and advanced image editing, bringing it closer to competing full-stack AI chatbots. The update also introduced Projects,allowing users to organize chats,documents,and ideas.

As of September 2025, Le Chat has a “Memories” feature, enabling it to remember previous conversations.

Mistral AI’s suite of models includes:

• Mistral Large 2, the primary large language model.
• Pixtral large, a multimodal model.
• Highway, a family of reasoning models.
• Mistral Medium 3, designed for coding and STEM tasks.
• Voxtral, an open-source AI audio model.
• Devstral, an AI model for coding, available under the Apache 2.0 license.
• Codestral,an earlier generative AI model for code.
• “Les Ministraux,” a family of models optimized for edge devices.
• Mistral saba, focused on Arabic.

In March 2025,Mistral AI introduced Mistral OCR,an optical character recognition API.

In June 2025, the company launched Mistral Code, a vibe coding client.

Who are Mistral AI’s founders?

Mistral AI’s three founders share a background in AI research at major U.S.tech companies that have operations in Paris. Its CEO Arthur Mensch used to work at Google’s DeepMind; CTO Timothée Lacroix and chief scientist officer Guillaume lample are former Meta staffers.

Mistral’s co-founding advisers include Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (also a board member) and Charles Gorintin from health insurance startup Alan. Former digital minister Cédric O is also an adviser to the company, a fact that has caused persistent controversy due to his previous role.

Are Mistral’s models open source?

Not all of them. Mistral differentiates its premier models, whose weights are not available for commercial purposes, from its free models, for which it provides weights under the Apache 2.0 license.

Free models include research models such as Mistral NeMo, built in collaboration with Nvidia which the startup