Today, we're excited to announce that the Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, is co-leading Mistral AI's €3.0 billion Series D at more than €21 billion post-money valuation, together with Samsung. It is the largest equity fundraising ever completed by a European technology company, three years after the company's launch. The round will fund deeper frontier research, expanded infrastructure and accelerated international growth. 

Our investment in Mistral is the Fund’s third, and a clear expression of what the Scaleup Europe Fund was created to do: make sure Europe's strategic technology companies can scale with meaningful European capital supporting them.

A large market at its inflection point, shifting toward control and trust

The central question in AI is shifting: from who can build the most powerful model, to how can organisations harness frontier AI without surrendering control. Especially in critical industries, companies and organisations have always been sensitive to where their technology comes from and how it is operated. Recent US export restrictions on frontier models are further reinforcing demand for sovereign AI solutions that they can trust with their most sensitive data. At the same time, rising frontier token costs are fuelling demand for lower-cost models customised to specific use cases, and boards and shareholders are pushing hard to turn AI pilots into real adoption in production, in large enterprises as much as in the public sector.

Our thesis is simple: the addressable market for AI built on control and trust – while already sizeable – is at a clear inflection point and will see rapid acceleration over the coming years. Serving it requires what few have: talent to build models at the frontier, deep domain expertise to help customers turn AI into real business value, and access to sovereign compute at scale.

Mistral: the full-stack champion of sovereign AI under customer control

Mistral is building on exactly those pillars to become the leading provider of full-stack AI solutions for the most complex and mission-critical use cases.

Founded in Paris in 2023 by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix – a world-class ex-DeepMind and Meta team. Mistral is Europe's leading frontier AI lab and home to one of the strongest AI research teams in the world, which we believe is a decisive advantage in a talent-scarce field. Its approach has been consistent from the start: open-weight frontier models built with strong capital efficiency. Today that means open frontier models alongside a family of smaller, specialised ones (coding, documents, speech) and, because the weights are open, customers can run, adapt and fine-tune them on their own infrastructure, with their own data, and never locked into a single vendor's roadmap, pricing or availability. 

Expanding beyond models, Mistral has built the delivery capabilities most AI companies lack. Forward-deployed engineers embed inside customer teams to scope the high-value use cases, integrate Mistral's models and platform into existing systems, and fine-tune them on the customer's proprietary data. It is the difference between a pilot and a system a business actually runs on, and it is how truly complex problems get solved: engineers who understand the model working next to people who understand the business. Success in one workflow then expands across teams and use cases, deepening each account over time. 

The third layer is compute. Mistral is building its own European infrastructure – targeting a gigawatt of capacity in Europe over the next few years, aimed to be Europe's largest AI campus outside of Paris. Access to EU-based, sovereign compute can allow customers to further reduce dependency on US hyperscalers while choosing where their intelligence runs. It is the boundary inside which an organisation's most valuable data, workflows and institutional knowledge can compound privately. 

In our view the combination of these layers drives a real flywheel, with each layer strengthening the others. Open-weight models lower the barrier to adoption for regulated buyers; forward-deployed engineers turn pilots into production systems, and success expands across teams and use cases; every deployment generates operational intelligence and reusable solutions that improve the models and shorten the delivery cycle; and owned compute improves the economics of everything above it. That compounding is the heart of our thesis – the platform can improve as it scales. Now with 125+ customers across 20 countries, Mistral is being adopted where the bar is high, including some of the largest enterprises and public institutions across financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, defence and critical infrastructure.

"Organisations want to industrialise AI inside systems that are already complex: their own data, their own tools, their own compliance constraints. That's the real problem. It's why we've built Mistral on open-weight frontier models and infrastructure that we control end to end, so our customers can too.” said Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral. “This demand is everywhere we look. This round means we can move faster on R&D, products, infrastructure and keep giving organisations the ability to run AI at scale, on their own terms.” 

Global ambition, European roots: core to the mandate of the Scaleup Europe Fund

We believe that Europe can create technology companies at the global frontier. But when they scale, the capital – and with it the ownership – has come from outside Europe. From 2013 to 2023, 82 percent of scale-up deals in the EU involved a foreign lead investor, according to data from the European Investment Bank. The Scaleup Europe Fund is here with the aim to change that. It exists so that founders with global ambition can keep strong European roots.

Europe needs not only the talent to build frontier AI companies, but the capital to remain at the table as they scale globally. AI makes that point sharper than any other sector: it is increasingly tied to economic competitiveness, to infrastructure, and to technological capability itself.

EQT, managing the Scaleup Europe Fund, also brings more than capital. Through the platform, Mistral gains access to one of the world's largest data centre franchises and deep infrastructure expertise, customer and partner introductions across Europe, the US and Asia, and capital markets experience for the next phase of its build-out.

We're excited to partner with Arthur, Guillaume, Timothée and the entire Mistral team as they build what we believe can become a generational European company – and a global leader.

*This is a marketing communication. Please refer to the information document of the Scaleup Europe Fund before making any final investment decisions.*