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Mistral raises €3B at a valuation above €21B in a round led by Samsung Electronics

French AI lab Mistral has raised €3 billion in a Series D round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion. Samsung Electronics led the round, with Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity as co-leads. Mistral calls it the largest equity round ever completed by a European technology company.

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TL;DR: Mistral raised €3 billion in a Series D round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion, led by Samsung Electronics. The company says the money will fund research, compute capacity and international expansion for its sovereign AI offering, which is built on open-weight models.

[Updated · 2026-10-14] This article was corrected against Mistral’s announcement and other published reports. The investor roles and the valuation wording were fixed, a wrong statement that Mistral’s main models are not open-weight was corrected, and claims about benchmark scores, response times, pricing, EU regulatory compliance, chip partnerships, government funds and Samsung’s earlier investments that could not be traced to a source were removed. The headline was changed to match.

Key facts

  • Mistral said on September 8, 2026 that it raised €3 billion in a Series D round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion.
  • Samsung Electronics led the round. Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity were co-leads.
  • Advent, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg joined the round as new investors. Existing investors that took part include a16z, ASML, Bpifrance, NVIDIA and Salesforce Ventures.
  • Mistral describes the round as the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company. That is the company’s own description.
  • The previous round, a €1.7 billion Series C led by ASML in 2025, valued Mistral at €11.7 billion.
  • Mistral says it operates across 20 countries and supports 125+ enterprises, including Airbus, ASML and HSBC.
  • Mistral Large 3 was released under the Apache 2.0 license in December 2025. Mistral does not publish a price for its Enterprise plan.

Mistral’s €3 billion Series D

Mistral, the French artificial intelligence lab, said on September 8, 2026 that it has raised €3 billion in a Series D funding round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion [1][2]. The company describes it as the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company [1]. That description is Mistral’s own.

Samsung Electronics led the round, with Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity as co-leads [1]. Euronews and The Register describe Scaleup Europe Fund as EU-backed [3][4]. Advent, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg joined the round as new investors. Existing investors that took part include a16z, ASML, Bpifrance, NVIDIA and Salesforce Ventures [1].

The valuation has nearly doubled in about a year. Mistral’s Series C, a €1.7 billion round led by ASML in 2025, valued the company at €11.7 billion [3][4].

Samsung also plans to use Mistral’s technology. A Yonhap report carried by The Korea Times says Samsung will integrate Mistral’s services and solutions into its semiconductor operations [5].

What changed: sovereign AI as a business

Mistral frames the round around sovereign AI. It describes this as an organization keeping control across four dimensions: data, models, compute and production systems [1]. The company says it combines open-weight models, the infrastructure and compute capacity they run on, and the products that bring them into production, so that “customers are never locked into a single vendor’s roadmap, pricing or availability” [1].

The Register writes that Mistral presents itself as a sovereign alternative to large US labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic [4].

Access and cost

Mistral Large 3 is an open-weight model. The company released it under the Apache 2.0 license on December 2, 2025 [6]. The company’s model list tags Mistral Large 3 as Apache 2.0. The same list also shows a Mistral Large 4, tagged Open. It tags some other models, such as Codestral and OCR 3, as Premier and names no license for them [7].

Mistral’s pricing page lists a Free plan alongside paid Pro and Team plans [8]. Mistral does not publish a price for its Enterprise plan. Its pricing page asks enterprise customers to contact the company, and says custom deployments can run self-hosted, in a private cloud or on-premises [8].

Where the money goes

Mistral says the round will expand its frontier research and scale its compute capacity for training models. It will also fund infrastructure, commercial growth and international expansion [1]. TechCrunch reports that the company is also pushing to build 1 GW of compute capacity in Europe by 2030 [2].

Mistral says it now operates across 20 countries and supports 125+ enterprises, including Airbus, ASML and HSBC [1].

Sources

  1. Mistral raises €3B to make sovereign, open-weight AI the technology frontier (mistral.ai)
  2. Mistral raises €3B as sovereign AI becomes big business (techcrunch.com) — 2026-09-08
  3. Mistral AI raises record €3 billion in Samsung-led funding round (www.euronews.com) — 2026-09-08
  4. Mistral bags €3B to build Europe’s sovereign AI champion (www.theregister.com) — 2026-09-08
  5. Samsung partners with French AI startup to enhance chip operations (www.koreatimes.co.kr) — 2026-09-09
  6. Introducing Mistral 3 (mistral.ai) — 2025-12-02
  7. Models Overview (docs.mistral.ai)
  8. Pricing (mistral.ai)

Frequently asked questions

How much did Mistral raise and what is its new valuation? ▼
Mistral raised €3 billion in a Series D round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion. Samsung Electronics led the round, with Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity as co-leads.
Is Mistral AI free to use or open source? ▼
Mistral Large 3 is an open-weight model that Mistral released under the Apache 2.0 license in December 2025. Some other Mistral models are labelled Premier in the company's model list. Mistral's pricing page lists a Free plan alongside paid Pro and Team plans. Mistral does not publish a price for its Enterprise plan and asks enterprise customers to contact the company.
What is sovereign AI and why does it matter for Mistral? ▼
Mistral describes sovereign AI as an organization keeping control over its data, models, compute and production systems. The company says its open-weight models, infrastructure and products are meant to keep customers from being locked into a single vendor.