French AI startup Mistral, which was recently valued at $13.8 billion and could be seen as a laggard in the frenetic race amongst its peers, created its first acquisition in the form of Koyeb, a startup that simplifies app deployment at scale while also managing the infrastructure.
In a blog post, Koyeb declares it will bring its platform, technology, and team to accelerate Mistral Compute offering. Compute is designed to provide leading teams across the globe the same state-of-the-art infrastructure Mistral AI utilizes to build, run, and scale frontier models and AI software. Looks like this is another warning shot from Europe across American Big Tech’s bows.
It is interesting that just recently Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch notified CNBC that so long as enterprises have the “right infrastructure in place” they’re able to connect their data to AI systems to create applications to run certain parts of work.
This is the first acquisition created by Mistral, which has till date created the headlines as developers of large language models (LLMs). Does it mean that the company is joining the huge league of players that position themselves as full-stack players? Of course, receiveting Koyeb on board does create sense as the French AI startup can utilize it to speed-up Mistral Compute adoption.
Launched last June, Mistral Compute is described by the company as a “European-hosted AI cloud that unites high-performance GPU capacity, turnkey orchestration, and advanced model-building tools in one fully integrated platform for developing and running cutting-edge AI.” With Koyeb in its fold, Mistral AI can now hope to scale up rapid and in the process take on American AI power.
It is quite obvious that Mistral does not want external factors such as the mad rush playing out in the AI circular deals playing out in the United States. Slow-and-steady seems to be their motto, a very French thing to do, given how Airbus industrie has done in the past to beat American Boeing at its own game.
Mistral AI, which was founded in 2023 and can be termed as the last-off-the blocks among the AI startups that kicked off post the ChatGPT preview in November 2022, has toed the Anthropic line by focapplying on supporting enterprises gain value from AI. The company recently achieved the crucial milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenues.
As for Koyeb, the company was founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway in 2020. Their aim was to support developers process data without bothering too much about server infrastructure, an idea that gained value as AI demand for processing power increased exponentially.
The company came out with Koyeb Sandboxes that provide isolated environments to deploy AI agents. The company supported enterprises deploy models from Mistral and other AI providers. Per the acquisition deal, while Koyeb’s platform would remain operational, its team and technology will be utilized to support Mistral deploy its models directly on client premises, optimise the GPUs and support scale AI inference.
What exactly does the deal bring forth?
In a blog post, Koyeb declares the rise of Gen AI and agentic workloads redefined cloud infrastructure as it increased scale and bought new requirements. Koyeb provides serverless GPUs, specialised accelerators and CPU workloads with capabilities to increase efficiency, enable new utilize-cases and control costs from sub-second scale-to-zero and autoscaling to sandboxes for agents.
Today, Koyeb operates a purpose-built serverless platform for teams to run AI applications, from APIs and agents on CPU to high-performance inference on GPUs, with no ops, servers, or infrastructure management, the blog stated. As part of the deal, Koyeb’s 13-member team and its three co-founders Yann Leger, Edouard Bonlieu and Bastien Chatelard would join Mistral.
Mistral CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix noted in a statement that “Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our development on the Compute front, and contribute to building a true AI cloud.” Koyeb had raised $8.6 million till date and this acquisition is likely to play a major role in building the foundations of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe.
On its part, Mistral AI too has ramped up its cloud plans in recent times with the company recently announcing a $1.4 billion investment across datacentres in Sweden. With growing demand from across Europe for alternatives to the US infrastructure suppliers, this could just be the deal that the company required to shift gears and hit the expressway to expansion.
Looks like Mistral and Arthur Mensch do mean business. In the same chat with CNBC, he stated his company works closely with customers to ensure that they have a fully custom applications to run a workflow, to run a procurement workflow, or to run supply chain workflows, for instance, in a way where I would declare five years ago, you would actually necessary a vertical SaaS.”
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