Mistral raised €3 billion with Samsung and a Commission-backed fund at the front of the check
Mistral raised €3 billion in a Series D at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion, the company value after the new cash, The Next Web writes. The company says it is the largest equity fundraising ever completed by a European technology firm.
Samsung Electronics led the round. Co-leads were PSG Equity, an existing backer since the Series C, and the Scaleup Europe Fund, a roughly €5 billion vehicle the European Commission set up so big European tech firms do not have to raise only abroad. EQT was selected to manage that fund in May.
Twelve months earlier Mistral closed a €1.7 billion Series C at an €11.7 billion valuation, led by ASML. Valuation nearly doubled in a year.
Both last two rounds were led by manufacturers rather than software investors. ASML makes the lithography machines that print advanced chips. Samsung makes chips and memory.
Mistral's thesis, via TNW and CEO Arthur Mensch, is that the first wave asked who could build the most powerful model. Organisations now ask how to harness one without handing over infrastructure and the intelligence loop, the cycle of data, training, and production use. Sovereignty is framed as four dimensions: data inside the organisation; models that can be customised; compute that is private and predictable; production systems that are auditable.
That framing is the company's pitch, not independent proof the stack is complete. Kirk Lepke at EQT and the Scaleup Europe Fund said most frontier firms choose a layer. Mistral is building across models, infrastructure, and applications from Europe.
The customer list Mistral cites includes operations across 20 countries and more than 125 global enterprises, naming Airbus, ASML, and HSBC. New investors include Advent and funds managed by BlackRock and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Existing backers taking part include NVIDIA, a16z, Bpifrance, ASML, and others.
Separately, Mistral raised $830 million in debt from seven banks for a data centre outside Paris and sold capacity to European industrial groups before it was built.
Europe wrote a check that matches the sovereignty argument. Whether the models catch the capital structure is the next twelve months.
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