Private equity and growth investors including EQT and PSG Equity have helped fund a €3bn Series D round for Mistral, the French artificial intelligence developer. The Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, co-led the round, and the broader syndicate is thick with private capital names, including new investor Advent and funds managed by BlackRock, alongside existing backers such as Eurazeo, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, and a16z. Samsung’s lead role, following a Series C led by ASML, also gives Mistral strategic backing from the front rank of advanced manufacturing and industrial technology.

New backers also include the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Mistral said the round will significantly expand its frontier research, fund the compute capacity needed to train more powerful models, and accelerate its commercial and international growth. The company now operates across 20 countries and supports more than 125 large enterprises, including Airbus, ASML, and HSBC, in their AI adoption.

Mistral is pitching itself as the provider of 'sovereign' AI, a full-stack offering that spans open-weight models, the infrastructure and compute to run them, and the products to deploy them, designed so that customers and governments retain control over their data, models, and systems rather than depend on a single vendor.