France's Mistral AI just closed a massive €1.7 billion ($2 billion) Series C round led by Dutch semiconductor giant ASML, catapulting the OpenAI competitor to a €11.7 billion ($13.8 billion) valuation. The funding doubles down on Europe's most credible challenge to American AI dominance, with French President Macron personally backing the company's Le Chat chatbot over ChatGPT.
Mistral AI is suddenly looking a lot less like a scrappy European startup and a lot more like a legitimate threat to Silicon Valley's AI monopoly. The French company just closed a monster €1.7 billion funding round that values it at €11.7 billion - more than double its $6 billion valuation from just 15 months ago.
ASML, the Dutch semiconductor powerhouse that makes the machines behind every advanced chip, led the Series C with a €1.3 billion investment. It's a strategic bet that signals how seriously the chip industry is taking Mistral's challenge to OpenAI's dominance. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Nvidia all doubled down.
The timing couldn't be more pointed. Just as Washington tightens export controls on AI chips to China, Europe's flagship AI company is securing backing from the very company that builds the lithography machines essential for cutting-edge semiconductors. ASML's CEO Peter Wennink called it a partnership to "explore AI models across ASML's product portfolio," but it's really about giving European AI a fighting chance against American tech giants.
Mistral's rapid ascent started with a record-breaking $112 million seed round in June 2023 - just one month after the company was founded. CEO Arthur Mensch, formerly of Google's DeepMind, and his co-founders from Meta tapped into European frustration with AI colonialism from across the Atlantic.
The company's Le Chat chatbot has become the poster child for this resistance. When French President Emmanuel Macron told citizens to "download Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI" during a February TV interview, it wasn't just political theater - it was economic policy. Le Chat hit 1 million downloads within two weeks of its mobile launch and grabbed the top spot on France's iOS App Store.
But Mistral isn't just riding nationalist sentiment. The company has built a genuinely competitive AI stack, releasing models like Mistral Large 2, the multimodal Pixtral family, and Voxtral for audio processing. Unlike OpenAI's increasingly closed approach, Mistral maintains some open-source models under Apache 2.0 licenses while monetizing premium versions through APIs and enterprise licensing.
