French AI darling Mistral is in talks to raise as much as $1bn in equity from several investors, including Abu Dhabi fund MGX, reports suggest.
Paris-based Mistral, Europe’s best funded AI company, is said to also be in talks for hundreds of millions of euros of debt financing from state bank Bpifrance, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Since launching in 2023, Mistral has been held up as Europe’s leading LLM (large language model) developer, seen by some as a legitimate challenger to industry leader OpenAI.
Last summer, the company raised €600m in funding from big-name backers, such as DST Global and General Catalyst, reaching a valuation of €6bn.
Mistral has sought to expand its offering beyond building LLMs, with Sifted revealing earlier this year the company had started exploring its tech’s potential military applications.
Talks for the latest round of fundraising are said to be at an early stage and subject to change. Sifted approached Mistral, MGX and Bpifrance for comment.
MGX was set up by the Abu Dhabi government last year. Its founding partners are Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala and Emirati AI firm G42. MGX has a mandate to invest in AI infrastructure, semiconductors, AI technology and applications.
The fund already has extensive links to France: in May, it announced plans to build Europe’s largest data centre there in conjunction with Nvidia.
MGX’s deal with Mistral could provide the company with some of the capital needed to compete in the global AI race dominated by the US and China. It’s not known what valuation the company is seeking the new financing at.
