The Dutch company ASML led the $1.7 billion Series C round, making Mistral Europe's most valuable AI company after Helsing. ASML has had a monopoly on developing extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, which are used to develop semiconductors. Europe’s relatively low investment capacity in AI has been criticised before, exemplified by Mistral seeking investment and partnership outside of Europe. This round is different with one European champion seriously investing in another one.
Investment in AI has been rising heavily the past few years. The majority has gone to large American companies, and even non-US companies are primarily funded by American investors. This week alone, the Dutch AI infrastructure company Nebius signed a $17.4 billion AI infrastructure deal with Microsoft, providing GPU infrastructure for over five years.
At the same time, Chinese startups are sharing impressive models with open weights. And Europe? Despite many initiatives for European language models, such as OpenEuroLLM, the Swiss Apertus model and other country-specific initiatives, Mistral has been the only European company producing foundation models that were able to swim along February’s DeepSeek waves.
Although Mistral has now become one of the most well-funded in the AI space in Europe, with the Nebius group (infrastructure, The Netherlands), Lovable (vibe coding, Sweden) and Helsing (defence, Germany) there are other growing players. However, these investments need to be spent wisely, considering Anthropic raised $13 billion just last week. For EU accelerationists and tech sovereignty advocates the Mistral deal represents exactly the kind of breakthrough they've been waiting for: a consolidation of the European Ecosystem.
Source: Crunchbase