What Is Mistral AI? Key Facts About the Emerging OpenAI Rival

Mistral AI, the French company behind the AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is widely considered one of France’s most promising tech startups—and possibly the only European firm positioned to rival OpenAI. Despite its impressive $6 billion valuation, its international market share remains modest.

Le Chat Makes Waves in France with Presidential Endorsement Ahead of AI Summit

The recent release of Le Chat on mobile app stores generated notable buzz, especially in France. In a televised interview before the AI Action Summit in Paris, President Emmanuel Macron even encouraged viewers to “download Le Chat, made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI — or anything else.”

Although this surge of national attention is a positive sign, Mistral AI still faces significant hurdles in catching up with major players like OpenAI—particularly while upholding its image as “the world’s greenest and leading independent AI lab.”

Since its founding in 2023, Mistral AI has secured substantial funding with the mission to “put frontier AI in the hands of everyone.” While not a direct critique of OpenAI, this slogan underscores the company’s commitment to openness in artificial intelligence.

Over One Million Downloads and Top Spot on France’s iOS App Store

Mistral’s answer to ChatGPT, the AI assistant Le Chat, recently launched on both iOS and Android. Within just two weeks of its mobile debut, the app surpassed one million downloads and reached the top of France’s iOS App Store rankings for free apps.

Beyond Le Chat, Mistral AI has built a robust lineup of models, including:

• Mistral Large 2: The company’s flagship large language model, succeeding Mistral Large.
• Pixtral Large: A multimodal model introduced in 2024 as part of the Pixtral series.
• Mistral Medium 3: Released in May 2025, this model emphasizes efficiency and is especially well-suited for coding and STEM applications.
• Devstral: An open-source coding model under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing unrestricted commercial use.
• Codestral: An earlier code-focused model, limited by a non-commercial license.
• Les Ministraux: A family of models optimized for edge computing on devices like smartphones.
• Mistral Saba: A model dedicated to Arabic language processing.
• Mistral OCR: Launched in March 2025, this optical character recognition API converts PDFs into text files for easier processing by AI systems.

Together, these developments highlight Mistral AI’s growing ambition to become a key player in the global AI ecosystem while maintaining a strong stance on transparency and accessibility.

Mistral AI’s Leadership Brings Deep AI Expertise

Mistral AI was founded by three individuals with deep roots in AI research at major U.S. tech firms with strong ties to Paris. CEO Arthur Mensch is a former researcher at Google DeepMind, while CTO Timothée Lacroix and Chief Scientist Guillaume Lample previously worked at Meta.

The company’s co-founding advisers include Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve and Charles Gorintin, both from the health tech startup Alan, with Samuelian-Werve also serving on Mistral’s board. Former French digital minister Cédric O is also among the advisers—a move that stirred controversy given his prior government position.

Mistral AI’s Le Chat Pro Subscription Launches with Paid Tier

While many of Mistral AI’s tools are available for free or offer free usage tiers, the company aims to generate revenue through Le Chat‘s paid plans. Its Pro subscription, launched in February 2025, costs $14.99 per month.

For business clients, Mistral AI monetizes its top-tier models through API access with usage-based pricing. Companies can also license these models directly, and a significant portion of revenue is believed to come from strategic partnerships—several of which were showcased during the Paris AI Summit.

Despite these efforts, Mistral AI’s overall revenue is still reportedly in the eight-figure range, according to multiple sources.

Read the original article on: TechCrunch

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