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Mistral AI

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Mistral AI SAS
Company typePrivate
IndustryArtificial intelligence
Founded28 April 2023; 2 years ago (28 April 2023)
Founders
Headquarters
Paris
,
France
Key people
  • Arthur Mensch (CEO)
  • Guillaume Lample (Chief Scientist)
  • Timothée Lacroix (CTO)
Products
  • Mistral 7B
  • Mixtral 8x7B
  • Mistral Medium
  • Mistral Large
  • Mistral Large 2 (123B)
  • Mixtral 8x22B
  • Codestral 22B
  • Codestral Mamba (7B)
  • Mathstral (7B)
  • Mistral NeMo 12B
  • Mistral Embed
  • Mistral Small 3.1
  • Mistral Medium 3
  • Magistral Small
  • Magistral Medium
Number of employees
150 (2025)[1]
Websitemistral.ai
Part of a series on
Artificial intelligence (AI)
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History
Glossary

Mistral AI SAS (French: [mistʁal]) is a French artificial intelligence (AI) startup, headquartered in Paris. Founded in 2023, it specializes in open-weight large language models (LLMs), with both open-source and proprietary AI models.[2][3][4]

Namesake

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The company is named after the mistral, a powerful, cold wind in southern France.[5]

History

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Mistral AI was established in April 2023 by three French AI researchers, Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix.[6]

Mensch, an expert in advanced AI systems, is a former employee of Google DeepMind; Lample and Lacroix, meanwhile, are large-scale AI models specialists who had worked for Meta Platforms.[7]

The trio originally met during their studies at École Polytechnique.[5]

Example of an image generated with Le Chat. The prompt is: Generate an image you feel represents yourself, Mistral AI.
Screenshot of Le Chat, Mistral AI chatbot, describing Wikipedia in a thoughtful way

Company operation

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Funding

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In June 2023, the start-up carried out a first fundraising of €105 million ($117 million) with investors including the American fund Lightspeed Venture Partners, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel and JCDecaux. The valuation is then estimated by the Financial Times at €240 million ($267 million).

On 10 December 2023, Mistral AI announced that it had raised €385 million ($428 million) as part of its second fundraising. This round of financing involves the Californian fund Andreessen Horowitz, BNP Paribas and the software publisher Salesforce.[8]

In October 2023, Mistral AI raised €385 million.[9]

By December 2023, it was valued at over $2 billion.[10][11][12]

On 16 April 2024, reporting revealed that Mistral was in talks to raise €500 million, a deal that would more than double its current valuation to at least €5 billion.[13]

In June 2024, Mistral AI secured a €600 million ($645 million) funding round, elevating its valuation to €5.8 billion ($6.2 billion).[14]

Led by venture capital firm General Catalyst,[15] this round resulted in additional contributions from existing investors. The funds aim to support the company's expansion.

Based on valuation, the company is currently in fourth place in the global AI race and in first place outside the San Francisco Bay Area, ahead of several of its peers, such as Cohere, Hugging Face, Inflection and Perplexity.[16]

Partnership with Microsoft

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On 26 February 2024, Microsoft announced a new partnership with the company to expand its presence in the artificial intelligence industry.

Under the agreement, Mistral's language models will be available on Microsoft's Azure cloud, while the multilingual conversational assistant Le Chat will be launched in the style of ChatGPT.[17] The partnership also included a financial investment of $16 million by Microsoft in Mistral AI.[18]

Services

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On November 19, 2024, the company announced updates for Le Chat (pronounced /lə tʃat/ in French). It added the ability to create images, using Black Forest Labs' Flux Pro model.[citation needed]

On February 6, 2025, Mistral AI released Le Chat on iOS and Android mobile devices.[citation needed]

Mistral AI also introduced a Pro subscription tier, priced at $14.99 per month, which provides access to more advanced models, unlimited messaging, and web browsing.[19]

Models

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The following table lists the main model versions of Mistral, describing the significant changes included with each version:[20]

Name Release date Status Number of parameters (billion) License Notes
Magistral Medium June 2025 Active ? Proprietary Enterprise reasoning model.[21]
Magistral Small June 2025 Active 24 Apache-2.0 Open-weight reasoning model.[21]
Devstral Small 25.05 May 2025 Active 24 Apache-2.0 Agentic model for software engineering tasks.[22]
Mistral Medium 3 25.05 May 2025 Active ? Proprietary Enterprise model available for on-premise deployment.[23]
Mistral Small 3.1 25.03 March 2025 Active 24 Apache-2.0 A new leader in the small models category with image understanding capabilities, with the lastest version v3.1 released March 2025.[24][25]
Mistral Small 3 25.01 January 2025 ? 24 Apache-2.0 Release in January 2025, Mistral Small 3 features 24B parameters.[24]
Mistral Large 2 24.11 November 2024 Active 123 Mistral Research License [24]
Pixtral Large 24.11 November 2024 ? 124 Mistral Research License On November 19, 2024, the company introduced Pixtral Large, which integrates a 1-billion-parameter visual encoder coupled with Mistral Large 2.[26][24]
Ministral 8B 24.10 October 2024 ? 8 Mistral Research License [24]
Ministral 3B 24.10 October 2024 ? 3 Proprietary [24]
Pixtral 24.09 September 2024 ? 12 Apache-2.0 [24]
Mistral Large 2 24.07 July 2024 ? 123 Mistral Research License Mistral Large 2 was announced on July 24, 2024, and released on Hugging Face. It is available for free with a Mistral Research Licence, and with a commercial licence for commercial purposes. Mistral AI claims that it is fluent in dozens of languages, including many programming languages. Unlike the previous Mistral Large, this version was released with open weights. The model has 123 billion parameters and a context length of 128,000 tokens.[24]
Codestral Mamba 7B July 2024 ? 7 Apache-2.0 Codestral Mamba is based on the Mamba 2 architecture, which allows it to generate responses with longer input.[27] Unlike Codestral, it was released under the Apache 2.0 license. While previous releases often included both the base model and the instruct version, only the instruct version of Codestral Mamba was released.[28][24]
Mathstral 7B July 2024 ? 7 Apache-2.0 Mathstral 7B is a model with 7 billion parameters released by Mistral AI on July 16, 2024, focusing on STEM subjects.[29] The model was produced in collaboration with Project Numina,[27] and was released under the Apache 2.0 License with a context length of 32k tokens.[29][24]
Codestral 22B May 2024 ? 22 Mistral Non-Production License Codestral is Mistral's first code-focused open weight model which was launched on May 29, 2024. Mistral claims Codestral is fluent in more than 80 programming languages[30] Codestral has its own license which forbids the usage of Codestral for commercial purposes.[31][24]
Mixtral 8x22B April 2024 ? 22 Apache-2.0 Similar to Mistral's previous open models, Mixtral 8x22B was released via a BitTorrent link on Twitter on April 10, 2024,[32] with a release on Hugging Face soon after.[33] The model uses an architecture similar to that of Mistral 8x7B, but with each expert having 22 billion parameters instead of 7. In total, the model contains 141 billion parameters, as some parameters are shared among the experts, but offering higher performance.[33][34][24]
Mistral Small February 2024 ? ? Proprietary Like the Large model, Mistral Small was launched on February 26, 2024.[24]
Mistral Large 24.02 February 2024 ? ? Proprietary Mistral Large was launched on February 26, 2024. It outputs in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, and provides coding capabilities.[35] It is available on Microsoft Azure.[36][24]
Mistral Medium December 2023 ? ? Proprietary Mistral Medium is trained in various languages including English, French, Italian, German, Spanish.[37] The number of parameters, and architecture of Mistral Medium is not known as Mistral has not published public information about it.[24]
Mixtral 8x7B December 2023 ? 46.7 Apache-2.0 Much like Mistral's first model, Mixtral 8x7B was released via a BitTorrent link posted on Twitter on December 9, 2023,[2] and later Hugging Face and a blog post were released two days later.[38] Unlike the previous Mistral model, Mixtral 8x7B uses a sparse mixture of experts architecture. The model has 8 distinct groups of "experts", giving the model a total of 46.7B usable parameters.[39][40] Each single token can only use 12.9B parameters, therefore giving the speed and cost that a 12.9B parameter model would incur.[38] A version trained to follow instructions called “Mixtral 8x7B Instruct” is also offered.[38][24]
Mistral 7B September 2023 ? 7.3 Apache-2.0 Mistral 7B is a 7.3B parameter language model using the transformers architecture. It was officially released on September 27, 2023, via a BitTorrent magnet link,[41] and Hugging Face[42] under the Apache 2.0 license. Both a base model and "instruct" model were released with the latter receiving additional tuning to follow chat-style prompts. The fine-tuned model is only intended for demonstration purposes, and does not have guardrails or moderation built-in.[43][24]


Mistral 7B

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Mistral AI claimed in the Mistral 7B release blog post that the model outperforms LLaMA 2 13B on all benchmarks tested, and is on par with LLaMA 34B on many benchmarks tested,[43] despite having only 7 billion parameters, a small size compared to its competitors.

Mixtral 8x7B

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Mistral AI's testing in 2023 shows the model beats both LLaMA 70B, and GPT-3.5 in most benchmarks.[44]

In March 2024, a research conducted by Patronus AI comparing performance of LLMs on a 100-question test with prompts to generate text from books protected under U.S. copyright law found that Open AI's GPT-4, Mixtral, Meta AI's LLaMA-2, and Anthropic's Claude 2 generated copyrighted text verbatim in 44%, 22%, 10%, and 8% of responses respectively.[45][46]

Mistral Small 3.1

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On 17 March 2025, Mistral released Mistral Small 3.1 as a smaller, more efficient model.[47][non-primary source needed]

Mistral Medium 3

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On 7 May 2025, Mistral AI released Mistral Medium 3.[48][non-primary source needed]

Magistral Small and Magistral Medium

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On 10 June 2025, Mistral AI released their first AI reasoning models: Magistral Small (open-source), and Magistral Medium, models which are purported to have chain-of-thought capabilities.[49][50]

References

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  1. ^ Bradshaw, Tim; Abboud, Leila (30 January 2025). "Has Europe's great hope for AI missed its moment?". Financial Times.
  2. ^ a b "Buzzy Startup Just Dumps AI Model That Beats GPT-3.5 Into a Torrent Link". Gizmodo. 12 December 2023. Retrieved 16 December 2023.
  3. ^ "What is Mistral AI?". IBM. October 2024.
  4. ^ "France's Mistral AI releases ChatGPT rival and partners with Microsoft". euronews. 26 February 2024. Retrieved 12 June 2025.
  5. ^ a b Journal, Sam Schechner | Photographs by Edouard Jacquinet for The Wall Street. "The 9-Month-Old AI Startup Challenging Silicon Valley's Giants". WSJ. Retrieved 31 March 2024.
  6. ^ "Spotlight Interview: Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch". The French Tech Journal. 24 June 2024.
  7. ^ "France's unicorn start-up Mistral AI embodies its artificial intelligence hopes". Le Monde.fr. 12 December 2023.
  8. ^ "Mistral lève 385 M€ et devient une licorne française - le Monde Informatique". 11 December 2023.
  9. ^ Metz, Cade (10 December 2023). "Mistral, French A.I. Start-Up, Is Valued at $2 Billion in Funding Round". The New York Times.
  10. ^ Fink, Charlie. "This Week In XR: Epic Triumphs Over Google, Mistral AI Raises $415 Million, $56.5 Million For Essential AI". Forbes. Retrieved 16 December 2023.
  11. ^ "A French AI start-up may have commenced an AI revolution, silently". Hindustan Times. 12 December 2023.
  12. ^ Abboud, Leila; Levingston, Ivan; Hammond, George (8 December 2023). "French AI start-up Mistral secures €2bn valuation". Financial Times. ft.com Financial Times.
  13. ^ Abboud, Leila; Levingston, Ivan; Hammond, George (19 April 2024). "Mistral in talks to raise €500mn at €5bn valuation". Financial Times. Retrieved 19 April 2024.
  14. ^ Kharpal, Arjun (24 May 2024). "CEOs of AI startups backed by Microsoft and Amazon are the new tech rockstars". CNBC. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
  15. ^ "Tripling Down on Mistral AI | General Catalyst". www.generalcatalyst.com. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
  16. ^ Bratton, Laura (12 June 2024). "OpenAI's French rival Mistral AI is now worth $6 billion. That's still a fraction of its top competitors". Quartz (publication). Retrieved 13 June 2024.
  17. ^ Bableshwar (26 February 2024). "Mistral Large, Mistral AI's flagship LLM, debuts on Azure AI Models-as-a-Service". techcommunity.microsoft.com. Retrieved 26 February 2024.
  18. ^ Sharma, Shubham (26 February 2024). "Mistral partners with Microsoft, announces new large AI model with chat app". VentureBeat. Retrieved 28 April 2025.
  19. ^ "Mistral releases its genAI assistant Le Chat for IOS and Android". Computerworld. 7 February 2025. Retrieved 7 February 2025.
  20. ^ "Models Overview". mistral.ai. Archived from the original on 9 April 2025. Retrieved 20 April 2025.
  21. ^ a b "Magistral". Mistral AI. 10 June 2025. Retrieved 10 June 2025.
  22. ^ "Devstral". Mistral AI. 21 May 2025. Retrieved 21 May 2025.
  23. ^ "Medium is the new large". Mistral AI. 7 May 2025.
  24. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q "Models Overview". mistral.ai. Retrieved 3 March 2025.
  25. ^ "Mistral Small 3.1 | Mistral AI". mistral.ai. Retrieved 24 March 2025.
  26. ^ "Mistral has entered the chat". Mistral AI. 18 November 2024. Retrieved 11 December 2024.
  27. ^ a b David, Emilia (16 July 2024). "Mistral releases Codestral Mamba for faster, longer code generation". VentureBeat. Retrieved 17 July 2024.
  28. ^ AI, Mistral (16 July 2024). "Codestral Mamba". mistral.ai. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
  29. ^ a b AI, Mistral (16 July 2024). "MathΣtral". mistral.ai. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
  30. ^ Sharma, Shubham (29 May 2024). "Mistral announces Codestral, its first programming focused AI model". VentureBeat. Retrieved 30 May 2024.
  31. ^ Wiggers, Kyle (29 May 2024). "Mistral releases Codestral, its first generative AI model for code". TechCrunch. Retrieved 30 May 2024.
  32. ^ @MistralAI (10 April 2024). "Torrent" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  33. ^ a b "mistralai/Mixtral-8x22B-v0.1 · Hugging Face". huggingface.co. Retrieved 5 May 2024.
  34. ^ "Mistral Releases Latest Open Source Model, Mixtral 8x22B". Pure AI. 17 April 2024.
  35. ^ AI, Mistral (26 February 2024). "Au Large". mistral.ai. Retrieved 6 March 2024.
  36. ^ Boyd, Eric (26 February 2024). "Introducing Mistral-Large on Azure in partnership with Mistral AI". Microsoft Azure Blog. Retrieved 17 February 2025.
  37. ^ AI, Mistral (11 December 2023). "La plateforme". mistral.ai. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  38. ^ a b c "Mixtral of experts". mistral.ai. 11 December 2023. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  39. ^ "Mixture of Experts Explained". huggingface.co. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  40. ^ Marie, Benjamin (15 December 2023). "Mixtral-8x7B: Understanding and Running the Sparse Mixture of Experts". Medium. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  41. ^ Goldman, Sharon (8 December 2023). "Mistral AI bucks release trend by dropping torrent link to new open source LLM". VentureBeat. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  42. ^ Coldewey, Devin (27 September 2023). "Mistral AI makes its first large language model free for everyone". TechCrunch. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  43. ^ a b "Mistral 7B". mistral.ai. Mistral AI. 27 September 2023. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  44. ^ Franzen, Carl (11 December 2023). "Mistral shocks AI community as latest open source model eclipses GPT-3.5 performance". VentureBeat. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  45. ^ Field, Hayden (6 March 2024). "Researchers tested leading AI models for copyright infringement using popular books, and GPT-4 performed worst". CNBC. Retrieved 6 March 2024.
  46. ^ "Introducing CopyrightCatcher, the first Copyright Detection API for LLMs". Patronus AI. 6 March 2024. Retrieved 6 March 2024.
  47. ^ "Mistral Small 3.1 | Mistral AI". mistral.ai. Retrieved 24 March 2025.
  48. ^ "Medium is the new large". mistral.ai. Retrieved 7 May 2025.
  49. ^ Wiggers, Kyle (10 June 2025). "Mistral releases a pair of AI reasoning models". TechCrunch. Retrieved 11 June 2025.
  50. ^ Mukherjee, Supantha; Cai, Kenrick; Mukherjee, Supantha; Cai, Kenrick (10 June 2025). "France's Mistral launches Europe's first AI reasoning model". Reuters. Retrieved 12 June 2025.
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