Mistral raises €3 billion Series D at a valuation above €21 billion

Mistral announced on Monday that it has raised €3 billion in a Series D round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion, three years after the French company launched. Mistral says it is the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company. Samsung Electronics led the round. The Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity were co-leads. New investors include Advent, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Existing backers such as a16z, ASML, NVIDIA, General Catalyst, Bpifrance, Lightspeed and Salesforce Ventures also participated. The company says the money will expand its frontier research, scale compute capacity for training models, build out infrastructure and accelerate international growth. Mistral now operates in 20 countries and reports more than 125 enterprise customers, including Airbus, ASML and HSBC. Its pitch centers on open-weight models paired with the infrastructure to run them, aimed at organisations that want control over where data is stored and how AI is deployed. The Decoder notes the valuation has roughly doubled since ASML invested €1.3 billion in September 2025, when Mistral was valued at about €12 billion. The company also took an $830 million loan in March to fund its own data centers. The Decoder adds that Mistral Medium 3.5 trails open models from Qwen and Kimi and does not compete with closed US models, and that European customers seeking to reduce reliance on US providers have driven much of its 2026 growth.