Mistral AI Acquires Koyeb in First-Ever Deal to Accelerate Cloud Ambitions

When Mistral AI’s three co-founders left their jobs at Meta and Google in 2023 to build a European alternative to OpenAI, few predicted they would become the continent’s most valuable AI company within two years. Now valued at $13.8 billion, the Paris-based startup has made its boldest move yet—acquiring Koyeb, a fellow French company that has spent five years quietly building the infrastructure to power the next generation of AI applications.

“Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our development on the Compute front, and contribute to building a true AI cloud.” — Timothée Lacroix, Mistral CTO and co-founder

A $13.8 Billion Bet on Full-Stack AI

The acquisition marks Mistral’s first-ever purchase and signals a significant strategic shift. Since its founding, Mistral has built its reputation on developing large language models that rival those of its American competitors. But this deal confirms something the company has been hinting at for months: it wants to be more than just a model provider.

In June 2025, Mistral announced Mistral Compute, an AI cloud infrastructure offering designed to give enterprises direct access to the company’s models without routing through third-party providers. The Koyeb acquisition is the accelerant that could make that vision a reality.

Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb developed a serverless platform that lets developers deploy AI applications without managing underlying infrastructure. As AI workloads grew more demanding, the company launched Koyeb Sandboxes—isolated environments specifically designed for deploying AI agents.

The Technical Integration

Koyeb’s 13 employees, including co-founders Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard, will join Mistral’s engineering team under CTO Timothée Lacroix. The integration plan is ambitious: Koyeb’s platform will transition into what Mistral calls a “core component” of Mistral Compute over the coming months.

The strategic benefits are threefold. First, Koyeb’s technology will help Mistral deploy models directly on clients’ own hardware—a critical capability for enterprises with strict data sovereignty requirements. Second, the acquisition brings expertise in GPU optimization, essential for managing the compute costs that have plagued the AI industry. Third, Koyeb’s infrastructure will accelerate Mistral’s AI inference capabilities, the process of running trained models to generate responses.

“This combination will play a key role in building the foundations of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe.” — Floriane de Maupeou, Principal at Serena VC

The Sovereign AI Play

The deal comes at a pivotal moment for European AI infrastructure. Just days before the acquisition announcement, Mistral revealed a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden, explicitly positioning itself as a homegrown alternative to American cloud providers.

The geopolitical dimension isn’t lost on investors. Serena, the Paris-based VC firm that led Koyeb’s $7 million seed round in 2023, sees the acquisition as validation of a broader thesis: Europe needs its own AI infrastructure stack, from models to compute to deployment tools.

The numbers suggest Mistral’s strategy is working. The company recently passed $400 million in annual recurring revenue, driven largely by enterprise clients seeking alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic. Koyeb will now focus exclusively on these enterprise customers—new users can no longer sign up for the company’s Starter tier.

What This Means for the AI Landscape

Mistral’s move reflects a broader trend in the AI industry: the vertical integration of the stack. Companies that started as model providers are increasingly building or buying their way into infrastructure, deployment tools, and enterprise services. The goal is to capture more value from each customer relationship while reducing dependency on cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

For competitors, the message is clear. Mistral isn’t content to be a European alternative to OpenAI—it’s positioning itself as a full-stack AI platform that can compete on equal footing with the American giants. The Koyeb acquisition is just the opening move.

CEO Arthur Mensch, speaking at Stockholm’s Techarena conference last week, hinted that more expansion is coming. Mistral is actively hiring for infrastructure roles and pitching prospective employees on a unique value proposition: a company “headquartered in Europe, that is doing frontier research in Europe.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition price is likely a fraction of Koyeb’s strategic value to Mistral’s cloud ambitions. For a company that has raised over $1 billion in funding, buying a proven infrastructure platform with an experienced team represents a relatively low-risk bet on a high-stakes future.

This article was reported by the ArtificialDaily editorial team. For more information, visit TechCrunch.