Mistral AI

Founded in Paris in April 2023 by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, Mistral AI trains its own large language models. Its stated mission is "to make frontier AI open to all", and a large part of its catalogue is released as downloadable weights that businesses can run on their own hardware.

Open weights alongside a paid platform

Mistral's first model, Mistral 7B, came out in September 2023, followed by Mistral Large in February 2024, Small 3, an OCR model, the Voxtral speech models, the Timestral time-series model and, in October 2026, Mistral Large 4, a mixture-of-experts model of about one trillion parameters with a one-million-token context. The Large 4 weights, published on 29 October 2026, come under the Mistral Ecosystem Open-Weight License, which is free for internal use but requires businesses that offer the model to others as a service to sign a commercial licence first.

The same models are sold through the Mistral API and Mistral Studio, its platform for building and deploying applications on them, launched in October 2025. Le Chat is its assistant for individuals and teams, relaunched in February 2025. Mistral Vibe, first released as Mistral Code in June 2025, is its coding assistant, and Mistral Compute, announced in June 2025, offers computing capacity. Mistral says Large 4 was trained on its own GPUs in European data centres.

Banks, carmakers and public bodies

The company names customers and partners in finance, manufacturing, energy, telecoms and the public sector, among them HSBC, BNP Paribas, AXA, Stellantis, CMA CGM, ASML, TotalEnergies, Orange, Ericsson, SAP, IBM, Cisco, Snowflake, the European Patent Office, the European Space Agency and France Travail. For many of them the pull is a European supplier whose models can be hosted in Europe or inside their own walls.

Key facts

Headquarters: 15 rue des Halles, 75001 Paris, France Registration: Paris trade register, 952 418 325 Founded: April 2023 Founders: Arthur Mensch (CEO), Guillaume Lample (Chief Science Officer), Timothée Lacroix (CTO) Funding rounds stated on its site: seed (June 2023), Series A (December 2023), Series B (June 2024), Series C (September 2025) Products: open-weight and API models, Mistral Studio, Le Chat, Mistral Vibe, Mistral Compute