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 buy Koyeb, a Paris-based startup that simplifies AI app deployment at scale and manages the infrastructure behind it.

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

Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb aimed to help developers process data without worrying about server infrastructure — a concept known as serverless. This approach gained relevance as AI grew more demanding, also inspiring the recent launch of Koyeb Sandboxes, which provide isolated environments to deploy AI agents.

Before the acquisition, Koyeb’s platform already helped users deploy models from Mistral and others. In a blog post, Koyeb said its platform will continue operating. But its team and technology will now also help Mistral deploy models directly on clients’ own hardware (on premises), optimize its use of GPUs, and help scale AI inference — the process of running a trained AI model to generate responses — according to a press release from Mistral.

As part of the deal, Koyeb’s 13 employees and its three co-founders, Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard (pictured in 2020), are set to join the engineering team of Mistral, overseen by CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Under his leadership, Koyeb expects its platform to transition into a “core component” of Mistral Compute over the coming 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 ramping up its cloud ambitions. Just a few days ago, the company announced a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden amid growing demand for alternatives to U.S. infrastructure.

Koyeb had raised $8.6 million to date, including 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 principal Floriane de Maupeou celebrated the acquisition. For the firm, this combination will play a key role “in building the foundations of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe,” she told TechCrunch.

In part thanks to these geopolitical tailwinds, but also due to its focus on helping enterprises unlock value from AI, Mistral recently passed the milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb, too, will be focused on enterprise clients going forward, and new users will no longer be able to sign up for its Starter tier. 

Mistral didn’t disclose financial terms of the deal, and it is unknown whether other acquisitions are in the works. 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 that is “headquartered in Europe, that is doing frontier research in Europe.”