Mistral AI buys Koyeb in first acquisition to support its cloud ambitions

Mistral AI, the French company recently valued at $13.8 billion, has made its first acquisition. OpenAI competitor has agreed to buy Koyeb, a Paris-based startup that simplifies the deployment of AI applications at scale and manages the infrastructure behind them.

Mistral is primarily known for developing large language models (LLMs), but this deal underscores its ambitions to position itself as a full-fledged player. In June 2025, it announced Mistral Compute, a cloud AI infrastructure that Koyeb now hopes will accelerate.

Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb aims to help developers process data without worrying about server infrastructure – a concept known as serverless. This approach has gained importance as demand for AI increases, which also inspired the recent launch of Koyeb Sandboxes, which provide isolated environments for deploying AI agents.

Before the acquisition, Quip’s platform had already helped users deploy models of Mistral and others. In a blog post, Quip said its platform will continue to operate. But its team and technology will now also help Mistral deploy models directly on customers’ own devices (on-premises), optimize their use of GPUs, and help scale AI inference — the process of running a trained AI model to generate responses — according to a press release from Mistral.

As part of the deal, Koyeb’s 13 employees and its three founders, Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu and Bastien Chatelard (pictured in 2020), are set to join Mistral’s engineering team, which is overseen by CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Under his leadership, Kuip expects his platform to become a “core component” of the Mistral Compute system in the coming months.

“Quiep’s product and expertise will accelerate our development on the computing front, contributing to building a true AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in a statement. Mistral is ramping up its cloud ambitions. Just a few days ago, the company announced a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden amid growing demand for alternatives to US infrastructure.

Quip has raised $8.6 million to date, including a $1.6 million pre-seed funding round in 2020, followed in 2023 by a $7 million pre-seed funding round led by Paris-based venture capital firm Serena, whose director Florian Di Maubiot celebrated the acquisition. For the company, this combination will play a key role “in building the foundations of Europe’s sovereign AI infrastructure,” she told TechCrunch.

Thanks in part to these geopolitical winds, but also because of its focus on helping companies unlock value from AI, Mistral recently surpassed $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb will also focus on enterprise customers in the future, and new users will not be able to sign up for the beginner tier.

Mistral did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, and it is not known whether other acquisitions are in the works. But speaking at the Techarena conference in Stockholm last week, CEO Arthur Mensch said Mistral was hiring in infrastructure and other roles, promoting the company to potential employees as an organization “headquartered in Europe, conducting frontier research in Europe.”