Mistral AI buys Koyeb in its first acquisition to support its cloud ambitions | TechCrunch

Mistral AI, the French company last valued at $13.8 billionmade its first acquisition. OpenAI’s competitor has agreed to buy Koyeba Paris-based startup that simplifies the deployment of large-scale AI applications and manages the infrastructure behind it.

Mistral is above all known for developing large language models (LLM), but this agreement confirms its ambitions to position itself as a full-stack player. In June 2025he announced Calculation of the Mistralan AI cloud infrastructure offering that Koyeb now hopes to accelerate.

Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb aimed to help developers process data. without worrying about server infrastructure — a concept known as serverless. This approach has gained relevance as AI has become increasingly demanding, also inspiring the recent launch of Koyeb sandboxeswhich provide isolated environments to deploy AI agents.

Before the acquisition, Koyeb’s platform was already helping users deploy models from Mistral and others. In a blog postKoyeb said his platform would continue to operate. But its team and technology will now also help Mistral deploy models directly to customers’ hardware (on-premises), optimize its use of GPUs, and scale AI inference – the process of running a trained AI model to generate responses – according to a Mistral press release.

As part of the deal, Koyeb’s 13 employees and three co-founders, Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu and Bastien Chatelard (pictured above in 2020), are expected to join Mistral’s engineering team, overseen by CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Under his leadership, Koyeb expects its platform to become a “core component” of Mistral Compute over the coming months.

“Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our development in the field of computing and contribute to the construction of a true AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in a statement. Mistral has intensified its cloud ambitions. Just a few days ago, the company announced $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden in a context of growing demand for alternatives to American infrastructure.

Koyeb had raised $8.6 million to dateincluding a $1.6 million pre-seed round in 2020, followed in 2023 by a $7 million funding round led by Paris-based venture capital firm Serena, whose director Floriane de Maupeou celebrated the acquisition. For the company, this combination will play a key role “in building the foundations of a sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe,” it told TechCrunch.

Partly thanks to these geopolitical tailwinds, but also due to its desire to help companies unlock the value of AI, Mistral recently reached the milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb will also now focus on enterprise customers, and new users will no longer be able to sign up for its Starter tier.

Mistral did not disclose the financial terms of the deal and it is unclear whether further acquisitions are in the works. But at the Techarena conference in Stockholm last week, CEO Arthur Mensch said Mistral was recruiting for infrastructure and other roles, pitching the company to potential employees as an organization “headquartered in Europe and conducting cutting-edge research in Europe.”

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