Mistral AI has completed its first acquisition, agreeing to buy Paris-based startup Koyeb in a move that underscores its ambitions beyond large language models. The French AI company, last valued at $13.8 billion and widely viewed as a European competitor to OpenAI, is expanding its footprint into cloud infrastructure and deployment services.
While Mistral has primarily built its reputation around developing advanced LLMs, the acquisition signals its intent to become a full-stack AI player. In June 2025, the company introduced Mistral Compute, an AI cloud infrastructure offering designed to support large-scale model deployment. With Koyeb now joining the fold, Mistral expects to accelerate that initiative significantly.
Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb set out to simplify how developers deploy and manage applications without handling underlying server infrastructure — a serverless approach. As artificial intelligence workloads became increasingly resource-intensive, this model gained renewed importance. The company recently introduced Koyeb Sandboxes, isolated environments tailored for deploying AI agents efficiently and securely.
Prior to the deal, Koyeb’s platform already enabled customers to deploy models from Mistral as well as other providers. In a blog post, Koyeb confirmed that its platform will continue operating. At the same time, its team and technology will support Mistral in deploying models directly on clients’ on-premises hardware, optimizing GPU utilization, and scaling AI inference — the process of running trained models to generate outputs — according to a press release from Mistral.
As part of the acquisition, Koyeb’s 13 employees, along with co-founders Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard, will join Mistral’s engineering division. The team will operate under CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Under his leadership, Koyeb anticipates that its technology will evolve into a “core component” of Mistral Compute in the coming months.
“Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our development on the Compute front, and contribute to building a true AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in a statement.
Mistral has been steadily increasing its investment in infrastructure. Recently, the company announced a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden, responding to rising demand for alternatives to U.S.-based cloud infrastructure.
Koyeb had raised a total of $8.6 million prior to the acquisition, beginning with a $1.6 million pre-seed round in 2020, followed by a $7 million seed round in 2023 led by Paris-based venture capital firm Serena.
Amid shifting geopolitical dynamics and increasing enterprise interest in extracting tangible value from AI deployments, Mistral recently surpassed $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Going forward, Koyeb will sharpen its focus on enterprise customers, and new users will no longer be able to sign up for its Starter tier.
The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed, and Mistral has not indicated whether further acquisitions are planned. However, speaking at Stockholm’s Techarena conference last week, CEO Arthur Mensch emphasized that the company is actively hiring for infrastructure and other roles, positioning Mistral as an organization “headquartered in Europe, that is doing frontier research in Europe.”
