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

Mistral AI, the French firm last 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 identified for creating giant 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 workers of French cloud supplier Scaleway, Koyeb aimed to assist builders course of knowledge without worrying about server infrastructure — an idea referred to 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 mentioned its platform will proceed working. However its workforce and know-how will now additionally assist Mistral deploy fashions straight on shoppers’ personal {hardware} (on premises), optimize its use of GPUs, and assist scale AI inference — the technique of operating a skilled AI mannequin to generate responses — in accordance to a press launch from Mistral.

As a part of the deal, Koyeb’s 13 workers and its three co-founders, Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard (pictured in 2020), are set to be part of the engineering workforce of Mistral, overseen by CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Below his management, Koyeb expects its platform to transition right into a “core part” of Mistral Compute over the coming 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 a press release. Mistral has been ramping up its cloud ambitions. Only a few days in the past, the firm introduced a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden amid rising demand for options to U.S. infrastructure.

Koyeb had raised $8.6 million to date, together with a $1.6 million pre-seed round 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 mixture will play a key position “in constructing the foundations of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe,” she informed TechCrunch.

Partly thanks to these geopolitical tailwinds, but additionally due to its focus on serving to enterprises unlock worth from AI, Mistral just lately handed the milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb, too, shall be centered on enterprise shoppers going ahead, and new customers will not find a way to join its Starter tier. 

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