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

Mistral AI, a French company the final price was $13.8 billionhe has made his first discovery. The OpenAI competition has agreed to buy it Koyeba Paris-based startup that facilitates the deployment of AI software at scale and manages the data behind it.

Mistral is best known for producing large language models (LLMs), but this partnership confirms its ambitions to position itself as a complete player. In June 2025he had announced Mistral Computean AI cloud provider that now expects Koyeb to accelerate.

Founded in 2020 by three former employees of the French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb aimed to help developers manage data. without worrying about server infrastructure – a concept known as serverless. This approach became important as AI developed, and fueled the recent adoption of Koyeb Sandboxeswhich provides a remote location to deploy AI agents.

Before the purchase, Koyeb’s platform already enabled users to ship samples from Mistral and others. In a post blogKoyeb said his platform will continue to operate. But his team and technology will now also help Mistral send samples directly to the client’s devices (on-premises), optimize the use of GPUs, and help develop AI concepts – the process of running a trained AI model to generate solutions – according to Mistral’s press release.

As part of the agreement, 13 Koyeb employees and three co-founders, Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard (pictured above in 2020), will join Mistral’s engineering team, led by CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Under his leadership, Koyeb expects his platform to transform into a “major part” of Mistral Compute in the coming months.

“Koyeb’s products and technology will support our development at the forefront of Compute, and help create a true AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in a statement. Mistral has been expanding its cloud ambitions. A few days ago, the company announced $1.4 billion in data centers in Sweden amid growing demand for alternatives to US infrastructure.

Koyeb had woken up $8.6 million so farincluding $1.6 million in seed funding in 2020, followed in 2023 by a $7 million seed round led by Paris-based VC firm Serena, whose CEO Floriane de Maupeou celebrated the purchase. For the company, this integration will play a major role in “building the foundation of the AI ​​infrastructure in Europe,” he told TechCrunch.

Partly due to geopolitical tailwinds, but also due to a focus on helping businesses unlock value from AI, Mistral has recently passed a major milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb, in turn, will be focusing on customers going forward, and new users will no longer be able to sign up for its Starter section.

Mistral did not disclose the financial details of the deal, and it is unclear whether additional acquisitions are in the works. But speaking at a conference in Stockholm’s Techarena last week, CEO Arthur Mensch said Mistral is hiring for operations and other positions, positioning the company for prospective employees as an organization that is “the largest in Europe, doing research in Europe.”