Mistral is expanding its footprint across Europe. Indeed, the decacorn has just opened its German hub in Munich. The office will focus on artificial intelligence research and industrial deployment. Karsten Wildberger, former CEO of Ceconomy, the electronics retail group (a shareholder in Fnac Darty), who heads the ministry dedicated to digital affairs and state modernization (established in 2025), attended the inauguration ceremony for the Munich hub, held at the Deutsches Museum, one of the world's largest museums of science and technology.

By setting up in Munich, Mistral says it wants to work closely with key industrial players, including its German partners SAP, Siemens Energy and BMW. The partnership with the automaker was announced with great fanfare last May at Mistral's “AI Now Summit” in Paris. The collaboration is part of BMW's “Large Industry Model” (LIM) initiative to fully embrace the AI era. As part of this initiative, Mistral AI will support BMW in developing multimodal reasoning models based on engineering data for complex use cases, such as crash simulations.

In addition to strengthening its relationships with industrial customers across the Rhine, Mistral intends to use its Munich office as a major recruitment hub for research, engineering and applied AI roles. To that end, the French company is actively recruiting in the Munich region to expand its capabilities in AI applied to physics and industry. It is also worth noting that Mistral has entered into a research partnership with the Technical University of Munich (TUM), notably to use TUM's wind tunnels to develop digital twins dedicated to automotive aerodynamics.

For Mistral, which also has offices in London, Singapore and Palo Alto in addition to its Paris headquarters located in the Marcadet-Belvédère building near Montmartre, the Munich hub represents another building block in its development as a major AI player focused on industrial applications. “It is from our new hub in Germany that we are building the future. Germany's industrial ecosystem is the backbone of the European economy. The engineering challenges that will shape the next decade of industrial AI are being tackled right here: in development workshops, at production sites, as well as in the research institutes and universities that train Europe's top technical talent,” says Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral.

The opening of the Munich office comes just weeks after a €3 billion funding round. The round was led by South Korean giant Samsung. ASML and Nvidia also participated in the funding round. It was followed by the announcement of the acquisition of startup Pimento to improve Vibe (formerly Le Chat), Mistral's conversational agent.