Mistral closes €3bn Series D at €20bn valuation, backed by EU's Scaleup Fund

French AI startup Mistral is raising €3 billion at a €20 billion valuation in its Series D, with Sweden's EQT leading or co-leading via its €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund. The round would nearly double Mistral's valuation from September 2025 when it closed a €1.7 billion Series C at €11.7 billion. Discussions are at an early stage and the terms remain subject to change, Mistral declined to comment.

The Series D would bring Mistral's total cumulative funding to approximately €6.5 billion (including €830 million in debt secured in March 2026 for data center expansion). The company plans to build 1 gigawatt of AI compute capacity in Europe by 2030, with an intermediate milestone of 200 megawatts by 2027 under its Mistral Compute initiative, positioning European enterprises and governments with sovereign compute capacity distinct from US-controlled infrastructure.

Mistral competes against OpenAI and Anthropic by offering both open-weight and proprietary models with an emphasis on data sovereignty for European customers. Strategic investors include ASML (which took 11% in Series C), Microsoft, Nvidia, and Andreessen Horowitz. The company has become Europe's flagship AI challenger and aims to reach €1 billion in annual recurring revenue by end of 2026.

For practitioners: this signals continued venture appetite for European foundation-model companies with infrastructure ambitions. If closed, it would mark EQT's €5 billion superfund's first major investment and demonstrates that Europe's policy-backed capital can still command allocation alongside traditional VCs for AI at scale.