Mistral AI Review — Europe's Open-Weight LLM Champion ($14B Valuation, $400M ARR)

Three French researchers left DeepMind and Meta to build Europe's answer to OpenAI — and bet that open-weight models were the path. Two and a half years later, Mistral AI has a $14 billion valuation, $400M ARR growing 20x in 12 months, ASML as its largest shareholder, a Microsoft Azure partnership, MCP connectors in Le Chat, and a French military contract. We review the models, the products, the business, and the competitive position.