Mistral AI buys Koyeb in first acquisition to again its cloud ambitions

Mistral AI, the French firm final valued at $13.8 billion, has made its first acquisition. The OpenAI competitor has agreed to purchase Koyeb, a Paris-based startup that simplifies AI app deployment at scale and manages the infrastructure behind it.

Mistral has been primarily recognized for growing massive language fashions (LLMs), however this deal confirms its ambitions to place itself as a full-stack participant. In June 2025, it had introduced Mistral Compute, an AI cloud infrastructure providing which it now hopes Koyeb will speed up.

Based in 2020 by three former staff of French cloud supplier Scaleway, Koyeb aimed to assist builders course of information with out worrying about server infrastructure — an idea generally known as serverless. This strategy gained relevance as AI grew extra demanding, additionally inspiring the latest launch of Koyeb Sandboxes, which offer remoted environments to deploy AI brokers.

Earlier than the acquisition, Koyeb’s platform already helped customers deploy fashions from Mistral and others. In a blog post, Koyeb stated its platform will proceed working. However its staff and expertise will now additionally assist Mistral deploy fashions immediately on shoppers’ personal {hardware} (on premises), optimize its use of GPUs, and assist scale AI inference — the method of operating a educated AI mannequin to generate responses — in response to a press launch from Mistral.

As a part of the deal, Koyeb’s 13 staff and its three co-founders, Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard (pictured above in 2020), are set to affix the engineering staff of Mistral, overseen by CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Underneath his management, Koyeb expects its platform to transition right into a “core part” of Mistral Compute over the approaching months.

“Koyeb’s product and experience will speed up our improvement on the Compute entrance, and contribute to constructing a real AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in an announcement. Mistral has been ramping up its cloud ambitions. Just some days in the past, the corporate introduced a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden amid rising demand for alternate options to U.S. infrastructure.

Koyeb had raised $8.6 million to date, together with a $1.6 million pre-seed spherical in 2020, adopted in 2023 by a $7 million seed round led by Paris-based VC agency Serena, whose principal Floriane de Maupeou celebrated the acquisition. For the agency, this mix will play a key function “in constructing the foundations of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe,” she instructed TechCrunch.

Partially thanks to those geopolitical tailwinds, but in addition resulting from its deal with serving to enterprises unlock worth from AI, Mistral just lately handed the milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb, too, can be targeted on enterprise shoppers going ahead, and new customers will now not have the option to enroll in its Starter tier. 

Mistral didn’t disclose monetary phrases of the deal, and it’s unknown whether or not different acquisitions are within the works. However talking at Stockholm’s Techarena convention final week, CEO Arthur Mensch stated Mistral is hiring for infrastructure and different roles, pitching the corporate to potential staff as a company that’s “headquartered in Europe, that’s doing frontier analysis in Europe.”