Mistral AI was established in April 2023 by three French researchers named Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix. These founders previously worked at Google DeepMind and Meta Platforms before meeting during their studies at École Polytechnique.
Mistral AI secured a €2 billion investment in September 2025 that valued the firm at €12 billion ($14 billion). This final round included an 11% stake acquired by Dutch company ASML through a $1.5 billion investment.
Microsoft announced its collaboration making Mistral models available on Azure cloud services on the 26th of February 2024. The partnership included launching Le Chat and involved a direct $16 million investment from Microsoft into Mistral AI.
Mixtral 8x7B uses sparse mixture of experts architecture with eight distinct groups of experts totaling 46.7 billion usable parameters. Each token utilized only 12.9 billion parameters for speed and cost efficiency when released via BitTorrent link on the 9th of December 2023.
The official release of Mistral 7B occurred on the 27th of September 2023 under Apache 2.0 license. This distribution method allowed broad usage rights and enabled developers to deploy models locally without cloud dependency fees.