French AI company Mistral has raised 3 billion euros in Europe’s largest-ever private tech funding round, valuing it at 24 billion dollars.

The round was jointly led by PSG Equity, which had already backed Mistral before, along with two new investors: South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund.

This funding puts Mistral in a strong position. According to the company’s chief financial officer Johan Bergqvist, it’s now Europe’s second-highest-valued private tech company and the fastest-growing one on the continent.

The fresh capital will go toward improving Mistral’s AI models and funding what the company calls frontier research, essentially, cutting-edge work aimed at keeping pace with bigger global rivals.

And the rivals are indeed much bigger. Mistral’s valuation is dwarfed by US companies like Anthropic, valued at 965 billion dollars, and OpenAI, valued at 852 billion dollars.

Both American firms are reportedly planning public listings sometime this year.

Bergqvist said an IPO remains a future possibility for Mistral too, but there’s no fixed timeline yet and no active discussions underway.

There’s a bigger picture here as well. Europe has been pushing to build its own AI capabilities, especially after a US decision in June restricted foreign access to two advanced AI models built by Anthropic.

Bergqvist pointed to this as one reason why Europe needs its own strong AI players, someone in the game who isn’t dependent on decisions made elsewhere.

Mistral builds what are called open models, which let customers download and customise the technology on their own servers.

The company currently serves more than 125 clients and is on track to hit 1 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue by the end of this year, with growing demand from clients in Asia and North America.

Notably, Microsoft, which had agreed in July to spend billions on Mistral’s European computing infrastructure, did not take part in this latest funding round.

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