Arthur Mensch Left DeepMind to Start Mistral AI
Arthur Mensch is co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, a Paris company that builds large language models. He started it in May 2023 with Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix. Before that he worked on large language models at DeepMind’s Paris office.
| Role | Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer |
|---|---|
| Company | Mistral AI |
| Headquarters | Paris, France |
| Industry | Technology |
| In role since | 2023 |
| Education | École polytechnique; Télécom Paris; MVA master’s, ENS Paris-Saclay; PhD (2018), Inria and NeuroSpin |
| Company website | mistral.ai |
Research Years in Paris and at DeepMind
- 2011: entered École polytechnique
- 2015 to 2018: PhD at Inria and NeuroSpin on large-scale brain imaging analysis
- 2018 to 2020: postdoctoral researcher at École normale supérieure in Paris
- Late 2020 to May 2023: researcher at DeepMind Paris
- May 2023: co-founded Mistral AI
His PhD, supervised by Bertrand Thirion, Gaël Varoquaux and Julien Mairal, covered predictive models and stochastic optimization for brain scans. He also spent several months at New York University’s Courant Institute during his postdoc.
Mistral AI’s Revenue and Latest Funding Round
Mistral AI licenses its models to companies and sells Le Chat subscriptions to businesses and consumers. It reported €300 million in annual recurring revenue in September 2025.
That month it raised €1.7 billion, with chip equipment maker ASML joining as a shareholder, at a valuation of about €11.7 billion. Mensch said in January 2026 that Mistral expects revenue above €1 billion by the end of 2026. He also said the company was looking at acquisitions and had set aside €1 billion for capital spending. Reaching €1 billion would mean more than tripling revenue from the September 2025 run rate.
