French AI company Mistral, based in Paris and named after a wind, is often misunderstood despite developing large language models (LLMs). Its chat and agent product Vibe, formerly known as Le Chat, has far less brand recognition than ChatGPT, and the company is following a Palantir-style playbook, deploying forward-deployed engineers to help governments and large corporations adopt AI and tailor it for their use cases.
Mistral is rumored to be raising around $3.5 billion at a $23.15 billion valuation, nearly double its current valuation. In February, the company disclosed annual recurring revenue above $400 million, up from $20 million one year earlier, and said it was on track to surpass $1 billion in ARR this year. CEO Arthur Mensch has become a public ambassador for the company's vision of ensuring broad access to the best AI systems "outside of centralized control exercised by states or corporations."
Mensch detailed in a LinkedIn post that Mistral deploys its models and agent platform on enterprise customers' infrastructure and helps them build custom models using Forge, a platform that lets customers train on their own data. He acknowledged that Mistral "does not yet own the best language models" but said the company is releasing an open-weight model this summer with early access in July, and noted it has state-of-the-art solutions in less compute-bound domains like voice, vision, and document processing.