Mistral AI teams up with ASML to raise €1.7 billion

French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI partnered with Dutch chip equipment maker ASML to raise 1.7 billion euros ($2 billion). ASML led the initiative by investing 1.3 billion euros in Mistral AI in a series C funding round.

The Dutch firm is now the biggest shareholder in Mistral AI, with a stake of about 11%. The French company also said the funding raises its valuation to around 11.7 billion euros, making it the most valuable firm in Europe.

ASML becomes Mistral AI’s top shareholder

According to Mistral, the initiative boosts Europe’s AI ambition by pairing the continent’s most valuable firm with its most credible rivals to U.S. tech giants like OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google, and Meta. The company’s CEO, Arthur Mensch, mentioned at the start of summer during London Tech Week that Mistral AI was establishing its first reasoning model to compete with Sam Altman’s OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek.

Mistral’s executive also noted that the company’s selling point for its reasoning modes is that it will be able to reason with European languages. He also promised that the company will add support for more languages later down the line. 

Former Google DeepMind and Meta researchers founded the French company and have transitioned it to become Europe’s AI alternative to the U.S companies. The firm has also positioned itself as a centerpiece of France’s strategy to become a leading AI competitor. 

Jan Frederik Slijkerman, analyst at ING, believes there’s an industrial rationale for ASML and Mistral AI to develop products together. ASML also recently appointed former French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire as an advisor to its executive board, which strengthened its French connections. 

Other investors such as DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Bpifrance, Lightspeed, and Nvidia participated in the Series C funding round. The initiative is also meant to integrate AI models across ASML’s semiconductor equipment portfolio and gain a seat on Mistral’s strategic committee through finance chief Roger Dassen.

Mistral AI upgrades its chatbot

The French company behind AI assistant Le Chat also received support from French President Emmanuel Macron, who urged citizens to go and download the app rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI. The chat assistant also reached 1 million downloads in two weeks after its release on iOS and Android. 

Mistral AI updated Le Chat to have the ability to remember previous conversations with the introduction of Memories. The chatbot was also updated in July with a new deep search mode, native multilingual reasoning, and advanced image editing. According to the company, the initiative brought it closer to its rival full-stack AI chatbots.

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