Mistral acquires French startup Koyeb for cloud offensive

Mistral AI has completed its first acquisition: The French AI company, most recently valued at $13.8 billion, is acquiring Koyeb, a Paris-based startup for cloud infrastructure. The acquisition underscores Mistral’s ambitions to position itself as a full-stack player – not just as a developer of large language models, but also as a provider of cloud infrastructure. In June 2025, Mistral announced Mistral Compute, its own AI cloud offering, which Koyeb is now set to accelerate.

Koyeb was founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway. The 13-person team around co-founders Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard develops a serverless platform that enables developers to process data without worrying about server infrastructure. With the rise of generative AI, this approach gained relevance – Koyeb recently launched Sandboxes, isolated environments for deploying AI agents. The startup had previously raised $8.6 million, including a $7 million seed round in 2023.

Serverless platform for AI workloads

Koyeb offers developers the ability to run applications without their own servers – including GPUs, specialized hardware accelerators, and CPU workloads. Thanks to automatic scaling, the platform adapts in fractions of a second to actual demand and shuts down unused capacity. Companies are already using the technology to efficiently deploy AI models.

Following the acquisition, Koyeb’s team under the leadership of Mistral CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix will also work on deploying models directly on customer hardware (on-premises), optimizing GPU usage, and scaling AI inference. “Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our development in the compute space and contribute to building a true AI cloud,” says Lacroix.

The Koyeb platform will continue to operate and is set to become a core component of Mistral Compute in the coming months. The team will focus on enterprise customers going forward – new users can only register for paid plans. Existing customers remain unchanged.

European AI infrastructure in focus

The acquisition fits into Mistral’s strategic focus on European AI infrastructure. Just days before the Koyeb announcement, the company had announced an investment of $1.2 to $1.4 billion in data centers in Sweden – a response to growing demand for alternatives to US infrastructure. The geopolitical situation and focus on enterprise AI recently brought Mistral past the $400 million ARR mark.

CEO Arthur Mensch is actively positioning Mistral as a European alternative and recruiting talent. At the Techarena conference in Stockholm, he described Mistral as an organization “headquartered in Europe that conducts cutting-edge research in Europe.” Mistral has not disclosed the financial details of the acquisition. Whether further acquisitions are planned remains unclear. The closing of the transaction is still subject to customary closing conditions.