Mistral is rumored to raise €3 billion at a €20 billion valuation

French AI lab Mistral is in early discussions to raise about 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion), Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing anonymous sources.

The funding round will value the company at approximately €20 billion (about $23.15 billion), nearly double the €11.7 billion valuation it received in its Series C funding round last September.

Mistral, one of Europe’s leading AI startups, launched in 2023 with a stated ambition to “put leading-edge AI into everyone’s hands.” The company has taken a more open approach to AI development than its American competitors, offering some large basic language models with open weights, allowing anyone to customize them as they see fit.

The company also offers closed models specifically designed for use cases such as programming, voice reproduction and generation, and optical character recognition.

Recently, as European countries distance themselves from American technology, Mistral has positioned itself as a friendlier, more “sovereign” and homegrown alternative. The company is building a data center near Paris, and has partnered with the French army, the Luxembourg government and several major European companies.

However, Mistral has only raised about $4 billion so far, according to PitchBook, a fraction of what its US rivals OpenAI ($186 billion) and Anthropic ($161.25 billion) have raised. These labs are also valued much higher, reflecting how far US labs have come in revenue, model adoption, and corporate demand.

Mistral did not immediately respond to a request for comment.