Why is Mistral AI, a startup founded two years ago, valued at 6.2 billion dollars? Understand in one article why Nvidia and a16z are betting on this French AI unicorn.

Mistral AI, known as a French AI startup unicorn, is regarded as the leader in generative AI in Europe, having a valuation of $6.2 billion in 2025, backed by tech giants such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, and a16z.

Mistral focuses on open-source models such as Mistral Medium 3 and Magistral, not only outperforming Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.7 by nearly 90% in terms of performance, but also holding a 5% market share in the large language model market in the United States. Since the beginning of the year, Mistral's revenue has surpassed 100 million dollars.

The advantages of open-source technology and low costs, supported by European governments.

The Mistral Medium 3 and Magistral AI models launched by Mistral AI are fully open-source, allowing developers and enterprises to deploy and modify them according to their needs. The low cost is its biggest attraction for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Users only need to pay 0.4 dollars for every 1 million words entered (Token).

The output only charges 2 dollars for every 1 million tokens.

In addition, the strategy of highlighting open source aligns perfectly with the European Union's emphasis on "data sovereignty" and "AI ethics," making it the first choice for enterprises and governments to adopt AI, and has also received strong support from the French government.

The image is a comparison chart of Mistral AI and other major AI models, covering API subscriptions, cloud platforms, and robots to strengthen operational models.

In terms of its operating model, Mistral adopts an API subscription and enterprise contract charging method, allowing corporate users to be billed based on the number of words through the API. This not only offers high flexibility but also competitive pricing. At the same time, it has partnered with Microsoft Azure to enable the model to be directly integrated into the corporate cloud environment, and has also launched the chatbot "Le Chat" to assist companies in handling customer service, automated replies, and other basic tasks.

On the other hand, Mistral has also launched the AI cloud platform Mistral Compute, integrating NVIDIA's Grace Blackwell chip, providing a one-stop AI cloud computing service from basic servers to PaaS platforms. This directly competes with major cloud providers such as Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure, and is an important weapon for Mistral to expand its high-margin infrastructure business.

The five moats of Mistral AI

Founded in 2023, Mistral has stood out within two years not only due to its open-source nature and low prices. It has also simultaneously established multiple layers of competitive advantages:

Planning for an IPO in 2025 to raise funds for strengthening research and development and global expansion.

Mistral is expected to launch its IPO within 2025 and has completed multiple rounds of financing, accumulating approximately $1.04 billion. Furthermore, it has partnered with Nvidia to deploy model computations on 18,000 Grace Blackwell chips. This shows that Mistral is not merely a model supplier but a comprehensive AI enterprise with R&D capabilities, cloud platforms, commercial applications, and global market strategies.

The next step is to target the Asian market and seize high-demand areas such as manufacturing.

Mistral's next step is aimed at the global market and product diversification. CEO Arthur Mensch stated that in the future, AI will not rely on a single model but will develop into a true "systematic intelligent agent platform" that provides enterprises with more comprehensive solutions.

In addition, Mistral is also expected to enter the Japanese market in 2026, establishing local operational bases to target high-demand sectors such as manufacturing, while also expanding into Asia, the Middle East, and the Southern Hemisphere.

(Jensen Huang, Mistral AI, and a16z: Building National Sovereignty AI to Avoid Digital Colonialism Starting from Oneself)

What makes this article worth a valuation of 6.2 billion dollars for Mistral AI, a startup just two years old? This article explains why Nvidia and a16z are betting on the French AI unicorn, which first appeared in Chain News ABMedia.