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

Mistral AI, the French company most recently valued at $13.8 billion, has completed its first acquisition. The OpenAI rival has agreed to acquire Koyeb, a Paris-based startup that helps teams deploy AI applications at scale while handling the underlying infrastructure that powers them.

Mistral has largely been recognised for building large language models (LLMs), but the deal underscores a broader strategy: becoming a full-stack AI company rather than only a model developer. In June 2025, Mistral announced Mistral Compute, an AI cloud infrastructure offering, and now expects Koyeb to help accelerate that push.

Koyeb was founded in 2020 by three former employees of the French cloud provider Scaleway. The startup set out to let developers process data without having to manage servers and infrastructure themselves — the approach commonly described as serverless. As AI workloads grew heavier and more complex, that concept gained new momentum and helped inspire Koyeb’s more recent Sandboxes product, which offers isolated environments for deploying AI agents.

Before the acquisition, Koyeb’s platform already supported deployments of models from Mistral and other providers. In a blog post, Koyeb said its platform will continue to operate as it does today. At the same time, Mistral said Koyeb’s team and technology will also support additional priorities: enabling Mistral to deploy models directly onto customers’ own hardware (on premises), improving how it utilises GPUs, and helping scale AI inference — the process of running a trained model to generate outputs — according to a Mistral press release.

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 expected to join Mistral’s engineering organisation, which CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix oversee. Koyeb said it anticipates that, under Lacroix’s leadership, its platform will become a “core component” of Mistral Compute over the next several months.

“Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our development on the Compute front, and contribute to building a true AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in a statement. Mistral has been pushing harder into cloud infrastructure lately. Just a few days ago, the company announced a $1.4 billion investment in data centres in Sweden, pointing to rising demand for alternatives to U.S.-based infrastructure.

Koyeb had raised $8.6 million in total funding before the acquisition. That included a $1.6 million pre-seed round in 2020, followed by a $7 million seed round in 2023 led by Paris-based VC firm Serena. Serena principal Floriane de Maupeou welcomed the news and said this combination will play a key role “in building the foundations of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe,” she said.

Buoyed partly by geopolitical momentum — and also by its focus on helping enterprises extract real value from AI — Mistral recently crossed the mark of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb, too, will shift more squarely toward enterprise customers in the future, and new users will no longer be able to sign up for its Starter tier.

Mistral did not share the financial terms of the transaction, and it remains unclear whether more acquisitions could follow. Still, speaking at Stockholm’s Techarena conference last week, CEO Arthur Mensch said Mistral is actively hiring for infrastructure and other roles, positioning the company to candidates as an organisation that is “headquartered in Europe, that is doing frontier research in Europe.”