Mistral’s three founders become first AI billionaires in France
With some 350 employees, Mistral now has its headquarters in central Paris along with offices in the US, London, Luxembourg and Singapore
[PARIS] The three founders of Mistral AI emerged as France’s first artificial intelligence billionaires after a funding round valued the tech firm at 11.7 billion euros (S$17.6 billion).
Arthur Mensch, the 33-year-old chief executive officer, Timothee Lacroix, 34, and Guillaume Lample, 34, each have a net worth of US$1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That wealth stems from each of them holding at least an 8 per cent stake in Mistral, which they set up in Paris in 2023.
A spokesperson for the company did not respond to requests for comment.
Mistral is completing a Series C round to raise 1.7 billion euros, which has drawn new investment from ASML Holding, the Dutch producer of equipment to make advanced chips. Existing investors include DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz and French public sector investor Bpifrance. Mensch said in an interview earlier this week that the company’s three co-founders and employees remain majority shareholders.
The valuation gives Mistral greater heft among AI startups in Europe in addition to its prominent political profile in France, where President Emmanuel Macron has promoted both the company and the country as a European hub for the fast-growing technology. Mistral has pitched itself as an alternative to Silicon Valley giants such as OpenAI and Google.
The new wealth of its millennial founders also puts a French company in the same league as some AI counterparts in the US including coding tool provider Anysphere, listed data operator Coreweave and search engine Perplexity. It also adds to the list of French ultra-rich that includes tech billionaire Xavier Niel, who has also invested in Mistral.
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The firm develops generative large language models and a chatbot called ‘Le Chat’ – a French alternative to Open AI’s ChatGPT and China’s Deepseek – and is perceived by many investors as Europe’s best bet to create a global AI player. Yet it’s still a minnow compared with others like Anthropic and Open AI, which have raised much more money.
With some 350 employees, Mistral now has its headquarters in central Paris along with offices in the US, London, Luxembourg and Singapore. The all-time total value of its contracts is 1.4 billion euros. Other early investors in the company include Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, Charles Gorintin and Cedric O, the former French digital minister. Samuelian-Werve is the startup’s de facto broker and consigliere as well as a board member.
Mistral CEO Mensch is the public face of the founding trio in charge of growing its business and handling fundraising efforts. While he posts regularly on LinkedIn including photos of himself with the likes of Macron, the prime minister of Luxembourg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, the other two keep much lower profiles.
Mensch graduated from France’s most prestigious engineering school, Ecole Polytechnique, and spent nearly three years at Google’s Deepmind. Lample, who is Mistral’s chief scientist, also attended Polytechnique before Carnegie Mellon University. Both he and chief technology officer Lacroix, who studied at Ecole Normale Superieure, worked at Meta Platforms before starting Mistral.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Mensch pointed to Europe’s talent pool as a source of strength for the company and acknowledged a certain pressure to succeed.
“We do have some weight on our shoulders in that we are the only European company providing” generative AI, he said. The CEO has repeatedly expressed the need for Europe to make advances in the area to lower dependence on the US both for the region as well as for clients from other nations worried about sovereignty.
“The independence we have is something we value dearly,” he said in the interview. “We’re not for sale.” BLOOMBERG
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