Mistral AI buys Koyeb in first acquisition to back its cloud ambitions

Mistral AI, the French company last valued at $13.8 billion, has made its first acquisition. The OpenAI competitor has agreed to the purchase Kojeba Paris-based startup that simplifies the deployment of AI apps at scale and manages the infrastructure behind them.

Mistral is best known for developing large language models (LLMs), but this deal confirms its ambitions to position itself as a full-stack player. In June 2025it had announced Mistral computeran AI cloud infrastructure offering that Koyeb now hopes will accelerate.

Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb wanted to help developers process data without having to worry about server infrastructure – a concept known as serverless. This approach became increasingly relevant as AI became more demanding, which also inspired the recent launch of Koyeb sandboxesthat provide isolated environments to deploy AI agents.

Before the acquisition, the Koyeb platform was already helping users deploy models from Mistral and others. In one blog postKoyeb said his platform will continue to work. But the team and technology will now also help Mistral deploy models directly to customers’ own hardware (on-premises), optimize GPU usage, and help scale AI inference – the process of running a trained AI model to generate responses – according to a Mistral press release.

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

“Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our development in computing and contribute to building a true AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in a statement. Mistral has stepped up its cloud ambitions. The company announced a few days ago a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden amid growing demand for alternatives to American infrastructure.

Koyeb had raised $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 firm Serena, whose director Floriane de Maupeou celebrated the acquisition. For the company, this combination will play a key role “in building the foundations of Europe’s sovereign AI infrastructure,” she told TechCrunch.

Thanks in part to these geopolitical tailwinds, but also to its focus on helping companies extract value from AI, Mistral recently achieved the milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb will also focus on business customers in the future, and new users will no longer be able to sign up for the Starter level.

Mistral did not disclose the financial terms of the deal and it is unknown whether other acquisitions are in the works. But speaking at the Techarena conference in Stockholm last week, CEO Arthur Mensch said Mistral is hiring for infrastructure and other roles, introducing the company to potential employees as an organization “headquartered in Europe, doing groundbreaking research in Europe.”