Mistral AI, the French company last valued at $13.8 billion, has made its first acquisition. The OpenAI competitor has agreed to buy Koyeb, a Paris-based startup that simplifies AI application deployment at scale and manages the underlying infrastructure. While Mistral has been primarily known for developing large language models, this deal confirms its ambitions to become a full-stack player. This move follows the company’s June 2025 announcement of Mistral Compute, its AI cloud infrastructure offering, which it now hopes Koyeb will accelerate.
Koyeb was founded in 2020 by three former employees of the French cloud provider Scaleway. The startup aimed to help developers process data without worrying about server infrastructure, a concept known as serverless. This approach gained significant relevance as AI applications grew more demanding. It also inspired the recent launch of Koyeb Sandboxes, which provide isolated environments to deploy AI agents.
Before the acquisition, Koyeb’s platform already helped users deploy models from Mistral and other companies. In a blog post, Koyeb stated its platform will continue operating. However, its team and technology will now also help Mistral deploy models directly on clients’ own hardware, optimize its use of GPUs, and scale AI inference. AI inference is the process of running a trained AI model to generate responses.
As part of the deal, Koyeb’s 13 employees and its three co-founders, Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard, are set to join the engineering team of Mistral, overseen by Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Under his leadership, Koyeb expects its platform to transition into a core component of Mistral Compute over the coming months.
Timothée Lacroix stated that Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate Mistral’s development on the Compute front and contribute to building a true AI cloud. Mistral has been ramping up its cloud ambitions, announcing just a few days ago a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden amid growing demand for alternatives to U.S. infrastructure.
Koyeb had raised $8.6 million to date. This included a $1.6 million pre-seed round in 2020, followed in 2023 by a $7 million seed round led by Paris-based venture capital firm Serena. The firm’s principal, Floriane de Maupeou, celebrated the acquisition, stating this combination will play a key role in building the foundations of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe.
In part thanks to these geopolitical tailwinds, and also due to its focus on helping enterprises unlock value from AI, Mistral recently passed the milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb, too, will now be focused on enterprise clients going forward, 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 unknown whether other acquisitions are in the works. However, speaking at Stockholm’s Techarena conference last week, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said the company is hiring for infrastructure and other roles. He pitched the company to prospective employees as an organization headquartered in Europe that is doing frontier research in Europe.