French AI darling Mistral isn’t planning to IPO anytime soon, CEO Arthur Mensch told Fortune in an interview.
Speculation over Mistral’s future has been rife in recent months, particularly after the emergence of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek raised questions over the viability of AI model builders. But Mensch has remained publicly confident after signing a slew of defence partnerships with government and corporate partners.
Mensch’s comments come a few months after he told Bloomberg the company’s objective was to eventually list publicly.
Mistral is “not for sale”, Mensch said at the time, denying rumours that the startup could be taken over by a competitor. When asked if the company would IPO instead, he answered: “Of course that’s the plan.”
Speaking to Fortune this week, Mensch clarified: “I was asked a question about our future, and what I said is that we intend to remain an independent company, [so] the natural path is to get to an IPO at some point.”
“Just to clarify, we’re not looking towards an IPO [right now].”
Mistral launched two years ago in Paris, cofounded by Meta and DeepMind alumni, with plans to create a European AI player that could compete against US-based Big Tech companies.
The startup quickly rose to fame, securing a record €105m seed round to build generative AI models that it says can compete with those developed by larger competitors like OpenAI and Meta.
The company faced criticism last year when it partnered with tech giant Microsoft, through which it began offering a number of closed-source AI models, seen by some as undermining its origins as an open-source AI provider, which typically means allowing users to download and tweak a provider’s code for themselves.
“It's as open as you can be. We share the weights, we share the inference, we share a lot of findings around how we built it. There's obviously some trade secrets that we keep, because how we bring our core value to work with customers," Mensch told Fortune.
It has raised more than €1bn to date, with its latest round, a €600m Series B (including €468m in equity), valuing the company at €5.8bn — the highest valuation for an AI startup in Europe.
Mistral says that it differentiates itself from its better-funded competitors thanks to its open-source approach to AI, which enables enterprise customers to deploy models that are both more customised and more privacy-preserving.
Last month, the company released its conversational assistant Le Chat on app stores, which lets users browse the web, access news, and analyse documents and data — suggestingMistral is increasing efforts to build consumer-facing products as well.
