Mistral AI is buying Koyeb in an early acquisition to support its cloud ambitions

Mistral AI, a French company valued at $13.8 billion, has made its first acquisition. Competitor OpenAI has agreed to buy Koyeb, a Paris-based startup that facilitates AI application deployment at scale and manages the infrastructure behind it.

Mistral is primarily known for building large-scale language models (LLMs), but this deal confirms its ambitions to position itself as a full-stack player. By June 2025, it had announced Mistral Compute, an AI cloud infrastructure that Koyeb now hopes will accelerate.

Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb aims to help developers process data without worrying about server infrastructure – a concept known as serverless. This approach gained relevance as AI grew in demand, and inspired the recent launch of Koyeb Sandboxes, which provide an isolated environment for deploying AI agents.

Before the acquisition, Koyeb’s platform already helped users download models from Mistral and others. In a blog post, Koyeb said his platform will continue to operate. But the team and its technology will now also help Mistral deploy models directly on customer hardware (on premises), improve its use of GPUs, and help scale AI inference – the process of using a trained AI model to generate answers – according to a press release from Mistral.

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

“Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our progress on the Compute front, and contribute to building a true AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in a statement. Mistral has been expanding its cloud ambitions. A few days ago, the company announced a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden amid growing demand for US infrastructure alternatives.

Koyeb has raised $8.6 million to date, including a $1.6 million seed round in 2020, followed in 2023 by a $7 million seed round led by Paris-based VC firm Serena, whose principal Floriane de Maupeou celebrated the acquisition. For the company, the combination will play a key role in “building the foundations of the AI ​​infrastructure in Europe,” he told TechCrunch.

Partly because of these geopolitical conditions, but also because of a focus on helping businesses unlock value from AI, Mistral recently passed a milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb, too, will focus on business customers going forward, and new users will no longer be able to sign up for its first tier.

Mistral did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, and it is not known if other acquisitions are still in place. But speaking at Stockholm’s Techarena conference last week, CEO Arthur Mensch said Mistral is hiring for infrastructure and other roles, pitching the company to prospective employees as an organization “headquartered in Europe, doing frontier research in Europe.”