Le Chat (Mistral)

Mistral AI is a French artificial intelligence company founded in April 2023 by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothee Lacroix, headquartered in Paris. The founders previously worked at Google DeepMind and Meta, and the company focuses on building efficient open-weight and commercial large language models.

Mistral develops a family of models spanning open-weight releases and higher-end commercial models, and offers Le Chat as its consumer- and business-facing assistant. It markets itself as a sovereign European AI provider emphasizing openness, efficiency, and data control.

Le Chat provides conversational AI with web search, document and image understanding, a code interpreter, image generation, and deep research capabilities. It supports connectors to third-party services and, since 2025, conversation memory that retains prior context and user preferences.

Le Chat is available on the web and mobile apps and draws on Mistral's own models. Business tiers add team features, and Le Chat Enterprise supports deployment options including cloud marketplaces, with self-hosting available through Mistral's enterprise offerings.

Le Chat targets individual consumers and professionals seeking an AI assistant, as well as businesses and public-sector organizations, particularly in Europe, that prioritize data sovereignty and control. Mistral's models separately serve developers and enterprises building custom AI applications.

Mistral AI has raised substantial venture funding. It raised approximately EUR 105 million in a seed round in June 2023, followed by a roughly USD 415 million Series A in December 2023, and a EUR 600 million round in June 2024 at about a USD 6 billion valuation. In September 2025 the company announced a further large round (reported around EUR 1.7 billion) led by ASML, valuing Mistral at roughly USD 14 billion. Investors have included Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and others.