Samsung is reportedly weighing a bet on Europe’s best-funded AI startup. The South Korean conglomerate is in talks to invest in Mistral as part of a fundraising round that could value the Paris company at roughly €20bn, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions.
The size of Samsung’s cheque is where the reporting turns slippery. The FT put it at “hundreds of millions of euros,” while several summaries of the story have rounded that up to about €1bn.
What is more firmly established is the shape of the round itself: Mistral is raising around €3bn, nearly doubling the €11.7bn valuation it commanded less than a year ago. A multibillion-dollar Microsoft deal to carry its models on Azure sits in the same recent stretch.
Neither Samsung nor Mistral has confirmed the talks, and both declined to comment when contacted by Reuters, which relayed the FT’s account. That is the standard caveat for a story of this kind, and worth keeping in view.
Early-stage funding discussions collapse, get repriced, or quietly change their cast of investors all the time, and the FT itself noted that both the amount and the valuation remain subject to change.
