AI startup Mistral to nearly treble Singapore headcount as it eyes growth in South-east Asia

[SINGAPORE] French tech unicorn Mistral AI, aggressively expanding on its South-east Asian presence through Singapore, is looking to increase its headcount in the Republic from 40 to 100 by the year’s end.

CEO Arthur Mensch said the firm will be looking to hire a mix of engineers, sales and operation staff in a move that will cement Singapore as a hub in the region.

“Singapore is a great place to hire from,” he told The Business Times, noting that the firm seeks to primarily employ local talent.

To ensure the smooth transfer of knowledge and competency, Mistral will bring in employees from its European office to guide the Singapore team.

Established in 2023, the Paris-based startup, valued at 11.7 billion euros (S$17.4 billion), develops large language models with both open-source and proprietary artificial intelligence models which can carry out tasks such as agentic workflow and software development.

The firm set up operations in Singapore in January 2025, specialising in AI sovereignty, which enables its models to be deployed in its customer’s own servers.

Mensch noted that the majority of Mistral’s customers in the Republic are organisations in the public sector and financial services.

He declined to cite a specific figure, but noted that Mistral has already invested “multiple dozens of millions of dollars” into its Singapore operations.

The investment sum, along with the client base Mistral has built, makes Singapore its biggest market in the Asia-Pacific, surpassing larger markets such as Australia and South Korea, he said.

Expanding in the region

Noting that the firm’s penetration into other South-east Asia nations such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia remained low, Mensch said the company was looking to change this.

Building on its sovereignty expertise, Mistral is eyeing the manufacturing and financial services sectors in other parts of South-east Asia.

The region’s culturally diverse market is a challenge, but Mistral is prepared to handle this. Mensch said that, with the company having clients from all over Europe – where more than 20 languages are spoken – Mistral is equipped to understand cultural nuances.

But the scaling of operations is a capital-intensive endeavour. Mensch said that instead of being “extractive”, the businesses of generating AI tokens and intelligence needs to be anchored with local providers.

In Singapore, the company signed an agreement with Singtel in April to leverage the group’s access to data centres and enterprises, in return for providing customers access to Mistral’s range of models.

To advance its agenda of sovereignty, the tech startup finds itself dabbling in the digital infrastructure space, having recently purchased data centres in Sweden and France.

Despite the high upfront costs, Mistral continues its push for expansion; Mensch said “access to capital has never been a problem to us”.

In September 2025, the startup raised 1.7 billion euros in its Series C funding.

The way Mensch sees it, the road to profitability is the industry’s key challenge. R&D costs aside, Mistral is “pretty close to break-even”, with profitability only a few years away, he said.

“Our approach to serving the models, to creating value with customers and our business model... is very efficient, and allows us to reinvest a lot of the proceeds in R&D.”