Mistral AI acquires Koyeb in first acquisition to support its cloud ambitions

Mistral AI, the French company last valued at $13.8 billion, has made its first acquisition. OpenAI’s competitor has agreed to buy Koyeba Paris-based startup that simplifies the development of AI applications at scale and manages the infrastructure behind it.

Mistral was primarily known for developing large language models (LLM), but this deal confirms its ambitions to position itself as a full-stack player. In June 2025had announced Mistral Computean artificial intelligence cloud infrastructure offering that Koyeb now hopes will accelerate.

Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb aimed to help developers process data without worrying about server infrastructure – a concept known as serverless. This approach gained relevance as artificial intelligence became more demanding, also inspiring the recent release of Koyeb sand boxeswhich provide isolated environments for the development of artificial intelligence agents.

Before the acquisition, Koyeb’s platform already helped users deploy models from Mistral and others. In one blog postKoyeb said its platform will continue to operate. However, the team and its technology will now help Mistral develop models directly on customer hardware (on-premises), optimize the use of GPUs and help scale AI inference – the process of running a trained AI model to generate answers – according to a press release from Mistral.

As part of the deal, Koyeb’s 13 employees and its three co-founders, Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu and Bastien Chatelard (pictured above in 2020), are to join Mistral’s engineering team, overseen by CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Under his leadership, Koyeb expects its platform to become a “core component” of Mistral Compute in the coming months.

“Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our growth on the Computing front and help create a true AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in a statement. Mistral has raised its cloud ambitions. Just a few days ago, the company announced investing $1.4 billion in data centers in Sweden; amid growing demand for alternatives to US infrastructure.

Koyeb had picked up $8.6 million to dateincluding a $1.6 million pre-seed round in 2020, followed in 2023 by a $7 million seed round led by Paris-based VC Serena, whose director Floriane de Maupeou celebrated the acquisition. For the company, this combination will play a key role “in building the foundations of the dominant AI infrastructure in Europe,” he told TechCrunch.

Thanks in part to these geopolitical headwinds, but also because of its focus on helping businesses unlock value from AI, Mistral recently passed its milestone $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb will also focus on enterprise customers in the future, 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 if other acquisitions are in the works. But speaking at Stockholm’s Techarena conference last week, CEO Arthur Mensch said Mistral was hiring for infrastructure and other roles, pitching the company to prospective employees as an organization “based in Europe, doing cutting-edge research in Europe.”