Samsung leads Mistral’s €3 billion Series D at more than €21 billion valuation

Mistral said Tuesday it raised €3 billion in a Series D at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion. The company said Samsung Electronics led the round. TechCrunch, The Next Web, Euronews, and Tech.eu reported the same size, valuation, and Samsung lead.

The Paris lab, founded in 2023, called the Series D “the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company.” That record claim is Mistral’s. TechCrunch attributed the record to the company rather than ranking European equity raises on its own. Mistral CFO Johan Bergqvist told the Wall Street Journal the same. PitchBook separately called it Europe’s largest VC round in its data.

Mistral said Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity joined as co-leads. That co-lead list is disputed: Constellation Research instead places Samsung with BlackRock and Luxembourg as joint leads, which does not match Mistral’s own list. Advent, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg came in as new investors, according to Mistral. Existing backers in the round include a16z, ASML, Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, General Catalyst, and Lightspeed, Mistral said.

Mistral said the money will expand frontier research, scale training compute, build infrastructure, and push commercial and international growth. CEO Arthur Mensch told CNBC the long-term plan is to own more of that compute rather than rent it. The Next Web reported that Mistral’s Series C, led by ASML, closed at €1.7 billion and an €11.7 billion valuation in September 2025; Euronews said the Series D nearly doubled the company. The Next Web described Scaleup Europe Fund as a roughly €5 billion vehicle set up by the European Commission, with EQT picked to manage it in May.

If Mistral’s figures hold, a three-year-old European AI lab has nearly doubled its valuation in a year and brought in Samsung after an ASML-led Series C, with EU-backed capital tied to the round. That mix of industrial and public-market-adjacent European money is the business story: Mistral is selling sovereign, open-weight, full-stack AI against U.S. frontier labs, and the cap table now matches that pitch. The record claim remains Mistral’s until someone publishes the comparable list.