Mistral has raised €3 billion in a Series D led by Samsung Electronics, valuing the French artificial intelligence company at more than €21 billion after the investment. Mistral described it as the largest equity fundraising round completed by a European technology company.
Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity co-led the financing. New investors included Advent, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Existing backers taking part included ASML, Nvidia, Bpifrance, Salesforce Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst.
The company said the money will expand its frontier-model research, training compute and infrastructure, as well as its commercial operations and international presence. Mistral now operates in 20 countries and says it supports more than 125 enterprise customers, including Airbus, ASML and HSBC.
Mistral’s previous round raised €1.7 billion in September 2025 at an €11.7 billion valuation. The Series D therefore lifts the company’s valuation by more than €9 billion in a year. TNW reported that Samsung and Scaleup Europe Fund are both investing in Mistral for the first time. Reuters ranks it as Europe’s second-highest-valued private technology company.
The equity follows €830 million in debt financing for a Paris data center that Mistral arranged in March. The company has since joined a consortium seeking to build one gigawatt of European data-center capacity by 2030, designed to host its own models and other open-weight systems. The financing also arrives after European policymakers scaled up their AI gigafactory program to seven sites with €5 billion in public funding.
Samsung, the lead investor, is also expanding its foundry business and has committed 70 percent of its memory production through 2031, including high-bandwidth memory used in AI accelerators. ASML, which led Mistral’s previous round and participated again, supplies the lithography systems used to make advanced chips.
Chief financial officer Johan Bergqvist told Reuters that the company is on track to reach $1 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026. Its customer base is expanding in Asia and North America as well as Europe, he said. Mistral lets customers download and customize its open models on their own servers.
Microsoft did not participate in the Series D, Bergqvist said, despite agreeing in July to spend billions of dollars on Mistral’s European computing infrastructure. Existing investor Nvidia joined the new round days after agreeing to acquire Hugging Face, another French-founded company in the open-model ecosystem.
Sources: Mistral, Reuters via MarketScreener, TNW
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team