Mistral said the funding would be used to ‘significantly expand’ its frontier research.

French AI start-up Mistral has raised €3bn in Series D funding at a post-money valuation of more than €21bn.

The round, which the company said is “the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company”, was led by Samsung Electronics with participation from the EU’s Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity, among others.

Mistral said the funding would be used to “significantly expand [its] frontier research” – which it described as “the foundation underpinning its infrastructure, products and sovereignty” – as well as scaling its compute capacity for training AI models, expanding its infrastructure, and growing commercially and internationally.

In its funding announcement, the Paris-based company, founded in 2023, said it is focused on more than simply creating ever-more powerful AI models, and that the new central challenge for organisations and governments is in “how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop”.

Mistral said it is “the only AI company in the world building the full stack” of open-weight models, infrastructure, compute capacity and products. It described its stack as a “sovereign AI layer” that promises ringfenced customer data, adaptable models, private computing capacity, and controllable and auditable AI systems.

The details of the new funding round are broadly in line with earlier reports that emerged in July. In March, Mistral raised $830m in its first debt financing, for the purposes of funding its data centre near Paris.

At the time, the company said the deal, supported by a consortium of seven “top-tier” global banks, would pay for Nvidia Grace Blackwell infrastructure with 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs at the “cutting-edge” centre, bringing powered capacity to 44MW.

Mistral – which said it operates across 20 countries and supports more than 125 global enterprises, such as Airbus, ASML and HSBC, in their “mission-critical AI transformation” – secured Series C funding of €1.7bn at a post-money valuation of €11.7bn a year ago, in a round led by Dutch chipmaking giant ASML.

The French AI company is seen as one of Europe’s frontrunners in the sector. However, its funding and valuations to date are much lower than the dominant US duo of Anthropic and OpenAI, which are each currently valued at nearly $1trn.

Media reports over the summer also placed higher – but more comparable – valuations on Mistral’s Chinese AI competitors such as Moonshot and DeepSeek.

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