French AI company raises 3 billion euros and makes new browser

The French company Mistral, which makes artificial intelligence (AI), has received 3 billion euros from investors in what's called a funding round. This means some investors pay money to own a part of the company, in return for Mistral being able to use the money to grow.

That now makes the company worth more than 21 billion euros. That's almost twice as much as a year ago, when the company was valued at 11.7 billion euros. According to Mistral itself, it's the largest equity financing ever completed by a European technology company.

Samsung leads the funding round

Among the investors is the South Korean electronics giant Samsung, which is leading the round, along with several other investment funds. The money will be used to build more computing power (meaning the computers that make AI programs work), expand to more countries and get more customers. Mistral today operates in 20 countries and has more than 125 large enterprise customers, including Airbus, ASML and HSBC.

Mistral calls itself a European and independent alternative to the big US and Chinese AI companies. The company uses the term "sovereign AI," which means that governments and companies keep control over their data and technology themselves instead of depending on foreign firms. French President Macron has praised the deal and calls the cooperation between France and South Korea a third way in AI, alongside the US and China.

New partnership with Mozilla

Along with the funding news, Mistral has also announced a new partnership with Mozilla, the company behind the free Firefox browser. Together they have made a new feature called Smart Window. It's a kind of digital assistant inside the browser that can help search complicated questions, remember content from pages you've previously visited, and find sources across the tabs you have open. The assistant runs on Mistral's own AI technology.

The feature is in a test version (what's called beta) and is coming first to France and North America. The UK and Germany will follow later this year. No date has been set for when Danes can use the feature, and it hasn't been disclosed whether it will cost anything.

An important selling point is privacy protection. Mozilla says conversations in Smart Window are by default not stored on its servers. Mistral also promises what's called "zero data retention," meaning no data is kept after you're done using the feature.

Taken together, the two pieces of news show how Mistral is both raising large sums of money and at the same time trying to get closer to ordinary users through partnerships like the one with Mozilla. The company's main focus, however, remains governments and large companies as customers.

What it means for you

The news mostly shows that big investors and companies believe in Mistral as a European alternative to US and Chinese AI. If you're an ordinary Firefox user, you can't use Smart Window yet, since it's only available in France and North America. If you work at a larger company, Mistral may be worth watching as a vendor, partly because of its focus on data security. You can safely hold off on doing anything; just keep an eye on whether the feature comes to Denmark later.