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French AI startup Mistral unveiled a new suite of AI models on Tuesday, signaling its ambition to challenge industry giants like OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek. The release comes a day after Mistral announced a major commercial agreement with HSBC, expanding its footprint in enterprise AI applications.

The startup’s latest portfolio includes a large model touted as the “world’s best open-weight multimodal and multilingual AI,” alongside a compact model designed for deployment in robotics, drones, vehicles, and edge devices. The smaller model, named Ministral 3, is engineered to operate on a single GPU, reducing inference costs and latency while delivering high domain-specific performance. Mistral claims these models enhance agentic capabilities for AI assistants, retrieval-augmented systems, scientific research, and complex enterprise workflows.

Founded in 2023, Mistral has quickly emerged as one of Europe’s leading AI innovators. In September, the company closed a €1.7 billion funding round, boosting its valuation to €11.7 billion. Investors included Dutch chip equipment maker ASML, contributing €1.3 billion, along with participation from Nvidia. Previous backers include Microsoft and Andreessen Horowitz.

“Mistral 3 sets a new standard for global AI accessibility and opens new possibilities for enterprises,” the company stated. “This spectrum of models extends applied AI capabilities to robotics, autonomous drones, and on-device applications that operate without network access, while supporting large-scale enterprise workflows.”

Commercially, Mistral is ramping up activity to justify its multibillion-euro valuation. Its partnership with HSBC will leverage the models for tasks ranging from financial analysis to translation. The startup has also secured several corporate contracts valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars and is exploring mergers and acquisitions to accelerate growth.

Despite its rapid expansion, Mistral faces fierce competition from U.S. rivals expanding into Europe. Anthropic raised $13 billion in September at a $183 billion valuation, and OpenAI reportedly sold secondary shares valuing the company at $500 billion in October, both establishing new European offices in 2025.

Mistral’s latest model releases and commercial agreements underscore Europe’s growing role in the global AI race, with the company positioning itself as a homegrown leader capable of rivaling some of the largest U.S.-based AI labs.