(Bloomberg) – The three founders of Mistral AI emerged as the first artificial intelligence billionaires in France after a round of financing that evaluated the technology company at € 11.7 billion (R $ 74 billion).
Arthur Mensch, the 33 -year -old CEO, Timothee Lacroix, 34, and Guillaume Lample, 34, each has a net equity of US $ 1.1 billion (R $ 6.9 billion), according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. This wealth stems from the fact that each of them hold at least 8% of the Mistral, which they founded in Paris in 2023.
Sought by the report, a company spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
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Mistral is completing a Series C round to raise € 1.7 billion (R $ 10.7 billion), which attracted new investments from the Holding NV ASML, Dutch producer of advanced chips manufacturing equipment. Existing investors include Global STD, Andreessen Horowitz and the French public sector investor BPifrance. Mensch said in an interview earlier this week that the three co -founders and employees remain majority shareholders.
Evaluation gives Mistral greater weight among those in Europe, as well as its prominent political profile in France, where President Emmanuel Macron has promoted both the company and the country as a European center for rapid growth technology. Mistral positions itself as an alternative to Silicon Valley giants, such as OpenAi and Google.
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Millennials and billionaires
The new richness of its founders Millennials also places a French company in the same league as some US AI counterparts, including the Anysphere coding tool provider, the Coreweave data operator and the Perplexity search engine. This also adds to the list of French ultra-rich, which includes the technology billionaire Xavier Niel, who also invested in Mistral.
The company develops large generative language models and a chatbot called “Le Chat” – a French alternative to OpenAi’s chatgpt and Deepseek of China – and is seen by many investors as the best bet in Europe to create a global AI player. Still, it is a small company compared to others like Anthropic and OpenAi, which raised much more money.
With about 350 employees, Mistral now has its headquarters in the center of Paris, as well as offices in the US, London, Luxembourg and Singapore. The total accumulated amount of its contracts is € 1.4 billion (R $ 8.8 billion). Other initial investors from the company include Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, Charles Gorintin and Cédric O, former French Digital Minister. Samuen-Werve is the broker and de facto counselor of the startup, as well as a member of the board.
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The CEO of Mistral, Mensch, is the public face of the founding trio responsible for expanding business and conducting fundraising efforts. While he regularly publishes on LinkedIn, including photos with personalities such as Macron, Nvidia Corp’s Luxembourg and Jensen Huang Prime Minister, the other two keep much more discreet profiles.
Mensch graduated at France’s most prestigious engineering school, École Polytechnique, and spent almost three years at Google Deepmind. Lample, who is Mistral’s chief scientist, also studied at Polytechnique before going to Carnegie Mellon University. Both he and the director of technology Lacroix, who studied at École Normale Supérieure, worked at Meta Platforms Inc. before founding the Mistral.
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In an interview with Bloomberg TV at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Mensch highlighted European talent as a source of strength for the company and recognized some pressure to succeed.
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“We have a weight on our shoulders because we are the only European company to provide,” he said. The CEO repeatedly expressed the need for Europe to advance in the area to reduce US dependence on both the region and for clients from other nations concerned with sovereignty.
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“The independence we have is something we value a lot,” he said in the interview. “We are not on sale.”
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