French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI is finalizing a €2 billion investment that values the company at €12 billion (approximately $14 billion), including the newly injected capital. This valuation reinforces its position as one of Europe's most valuable technology startups.

The OpenAI competitor is developing open-source language models, a chatbot called "Le Chat" targeted at European users, and other artificial intelligence services. The company was co-founded in 2023 by former DeepMind researcher Arthur Mensch and former Meta researchers Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample.

Earlier this summer, the company was in discussions to raise up to $1 billion in equity from investors including Abu Dhabi fund MGX. Mistral is working to carve out space in a field increasingly dominated by large language models from the United States and China.

The company has previously raised over €1 billion from global investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, the French national investment bank, and BNP Paribas. This marks the company's first new funding round since raising capital at a €5.8 billion valuation in June 2024.

Earlier this year, Mensch indicated the company was considering using external capital to establish data centers in France. Beyond the early-stage funding negotiations, the company has recently been in talks with French lenders, including the national investment bank, regarding debt financing of several hundred million euros for the Mistral Compute project. Mistral Compute is a new artificial intelligence cloud service being developed in partnership with Nvidia in France.

This funding comes as AI competitors such as Anthropic and OpenAI expand their capital reserves. OpenAI completed a large-scale funding round in the spring, while Anthropic completed $13 billion in funding at an $183 billion valuation this week.