French AI lab Mistral releases new AI models as it looks to keep pace with OpenAI and Google

Key Points

• French AI startup Mistral unveiled a new suite of models on Tuesday.
• The company is one of Europe's leading AI startups and raised 11.7 billion euros in September.
• The release comes a day on from a major commercial deal with HSBC.

Artificial intelligence startup Mistral released a new suite of models Tuesday as it looks to keep pace with leading AI labs Google, OpenAI and DeepSeek. 

The French company's announcement follows on from model releases from the likes of DeepSeek and Google in recent weeks, as AI labs across the globe scramble to remain at the frontier of research while also building out commercial operations. 

Mistral's release includes a large model which it claims is the "world's best open-weight multimodal and multilingual." It also announced the release of a small model the company says can be used in robotics, devices and drones.

Founded in 2023, Mistral has emerged as one of Europe's leading AI companies and raised a 1.7 billion euro funding round in September. Dutch chip equipment maker ASML contributed 1.3 billion euros of the raise, with Nvidia also participating. 

The round saw the startup — which was previously backed by Microsoft and Andreessen Horowitz — hit an 11.7 billion euro valuation.

"Mistral 3 sets a new standard for the global availability of AI and unlocks new possibilities for enterprises," the company said in a statement. 

"This spectrum of models further extends our customers' applied AI capabilities to robotics, autonomous drones, and small on-device applications without network access, as well as the world's largest enterprise agentic workflows."

Mistral's new large model offers powerful agentic capabilities and is engineered for AI assistants, retrieval-augmented systems, scientific workloads and complex enterprise workflows, the company said. 

The startup's new small model, dubbed Ministral 3, is small enough to run in drones, cars, robots, phones and laptops.

"Small models deliver advantages for most real-world applications: lower inference cost, reduced latency, and domain-specific performance," Mistral said. "They can be customized to outperform larger models on specific workflows and reach state-of-the-art performance for their size."

Ministral 3 can be deployed on a single graphics processing unit (GPU), which the company said reduced running costs and sped up iteration. 

"The next chapter of AI isn't just bigger — it's smarter, faster, and open," the company said. "Together, we're building towards an era of distributed intelligence."

The latest releases come as Mistral looks to ramp up commercial activity in a bid to justify its nearly 12 billion euro price tag.

Alongside a deal with HSBC to give the multinational bank access to its models for tasks ranging from financial analysis to translation, announced on Monday, Mistral has inked contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with several corporates. 

The startup is also increasingly looking to M&A as it accelerates growth. While considered a leading homegrown player in the AI space in Europe, Mistral's war chest pales in comparison to a cohort of U.S. rivals that are increasingly setting up shop on the continent. 

Anthropic, which announced a $13 billion raise at a $183 billion valuation in September, and OpenAI, which reportedly sold secondary shares at a $500 billion price tag in October, have both announced new offices in Europe in 2025.