Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its $6 billion valuation, its global market share is still relatively low.
However, the recent launch of its chat assistant on mobile app stores was met with some hype, particularly in its home country. “Go and download Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI — or something else,” French president Emmanuel Macron said in a TV interview ahead of the AI Action Summit in Paris.
While this wave of attention may be encouraging, Mistral AI still faces challenges in competing with the likes of OpenAI — and in doing so while keeping up with its self-definition as “the world’s greenest and leading independent AI lab.”
What is Mistral AI?
Mistral AI has raised significant amounts of funding since its creation in 2023 with the ambition to “put frontier AI in the hands of everyone.” While this isn’t a direct jab at OpenAI, the slogan is meant to highlight the company’s advocacy for openness in AI.
Its alternative to ChatGPT, chat assistant Le Chat, is now also available on iOS and Android. It reached 1 million downloads in the two weeks following its mobile release, even grabbing France’s top spot for free downloads on the iOS App Store.
This comes in addition to Mistral AI’s suite of models, which includes:
In March 2025, the company introduced Mistral OCR, an optical character recognition (OCR) API that can turn any PDF into a text file to make it easier for AI models to ingest.
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