A year ago, Europe had multiple AI startups that could plausibly compete with OpenAI and Google. Now it has Mistral.
Well-financed artificial intelligence startups in Germany and the UK have sputtered or stopped making major models, leaving the French startup darling left to convince customers, investors and politicians that Europe can hold its own on the critical technology.
“Mistral is even more alone in Europe than it was before,” said Jean Charles Samuelian-Werve, co-founding advisor and board member of Mistral, who described the company as “strategically important in Europe.”
Samuelian-Werve, 37, is far more than a typical board member. He is the startup’s de facto chief strategist, broker and consigliere, playing a critical role in the effort to develop European AI capabilities anywhere close to US competitors.
The soft-spoken Frenchman was instrumental in forming the startup in early 2023 and has since shaped its commercial strategy and won marquee clients like Belgium’s Belfius Bank SA. He takes credit for bringing in a “large majority” of Mistral’s backers, who gave the company a €5.8 billion ($6 billion) valuation last year. And that’s alongside his day job running French health insurer Alan, now worth €4 billion, largely on the back of its AI potential. Later this week, Alan is set to update investors on substantial growth over the past year.
But global success isn’t guaranteed. Both Alan and Mistral must live up to lofty valuations as Europe’s capital markets, tech investing and economic growth lag well behind the US. President Donald Trump has pledged broad industrial policy to support American AI developers, and limited regulation. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron’s government is in shambles and the European Union is implementing one of the broadest laws putting guardrails around the technology.
Mistral, in particular, needs far more commercial traction and capital to compete. Its open-source AI language models, the startup’s main attraction, are widely seen as an also-ran against those from Meta Platforms Inc. Rivals OpenAI and Anthropic have been raising far larger war chests, giving them reported valuations of $157 billion and $60 billion respectively.
Over the past year, Mistral held talks with Meta and Apple Inc. on potential partnerships, according to multiple people briefed on the plans.
Still those talks, as well as Mistral’s diminished size next to Silicon Valley’s ballooning AI firms, have spurred widespread speculation among venture capitalists that the French startup is a takeover target.
Samuelian-Werve vehemently denied this, and points to a series of “big” commercial and product announcements in the coming weeks. “We’re really not going to give up to make a global champion,” he said.
At the World Economic Forum, Mistral Chief Executive Officer Arthur Mensch also denied that his startup was for sale, noting that the company was working toward an initial public offering.
A Mistral spokesperson declined to comment on any talks. Meta declined to comment. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
European Champion
Mistral has positioned itself as more nimble than others, developing AI models, chatbots and services on a leaner staff and computing resources. Without that strategy, Mistral risks losing to richer competitors, said Jean de La Rochebrochard, a managing partner with Kima Ventures and Mistral investor. “You’re doomed,” he said. “No way you’re going to win.”
Much of that pressure falls on Mistral’s strategist-in-chief, whose salesmanship is essential to its survival.
In the summer of 2022, months before the launch of ChatGPT, Samuelian-Werve began talking to French computer scientists and investors about his concern that Europe would miss out on AI advances, falling behind as it had with the internet decades ago. He pitched Xavier Niel, the telecom billionaire and Alan backer, a two-page document outlining the need for an AI non-profit backed by the French state.
After joining Mensch and his collaborators, two AI engineers from Meta, the group ditched the non-profit idea. Mistral launched in early 2023 with Samuelian-Werve and his Alan co-founder, Charles Gorintin, as advisors and major shareholders alongside Cedric O, a former Macron minister. Alan also became a shareholder.
Mistral opened its office in a glass-paned 1980s building in Paris’s trendy Canal Saint-Martin neighborhood. It leased the space from Alan, whose headquarters are in the building. That makes it easy for Samuelian-Werve to hold his weekly meetings with Mensch, where the pair discuss everything from Mistral’s financing strategy to its cost structures and new hires. “We share everything we know,” Samuelian-Werve said.
Mistral, in a statement, said Samuelian-Werve “played a key role” in Mistral’s inception and remains a “valuable sparring partner today.”
Mistral’s investors aren’t bothered by Samuelian-Werve’s double duty. They see value in his operational advice to a company run by first-time executives. He’s advised Mensch to ditch some advice from investors, like taking outside speaking events, said Paul Murphy, a Mistral backer from Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Niel cited Samuelian-Werve as the driving force behind Mistral’s early commercial strategy. It’s that salesmanship that will make the difference for Mistral’s ability to withstand bigger competitors. “We are very good in France at tech, but not always very good at selling,” Niel said. “Jean-Charles has been very good at creating a team to sell.”
Samuelian-Werve persuaded Lightspeed to lead Mistral’s first financing, and other investors followed, often after introductions from the Alan CEO. “Everyone who was in the mix heard about it through him,” Murphy recalled.
“I would squarely put Jean-Charles in the count-on-one-hand group of most exceptional founders,” said Jan Hammer, a partner with Index Ventures, which invested in Mistral and Alan.
Serial Entrepreneur
With Alan, Samuelian-Werve has shown he can deliver commercial success.
The entrepreneur runs his company with radical transparency. Every decision at Alan – from budget line items to product pricing to employee salaries – is shared widely in an internal dashboard that now counts, Samuelian-Werve boasted, some 28,000 instances.
He said this approach is designed to abolish “the myth of secrecy” at tech companies. “It’s not for everyone,” he admitted.
The CEO prefers his employees to use their own internal data and documents to set strategy rather than holding in-person meetings. He modeled Alan’s corporate culture off of giants like Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., and touts it as a model for other French startups. “I invite you to copy us without any shame,” he wrote in Healthy Business, a French book on management he published in 2020.
Alan’s app initially offered patients ways to order prescriptions and manage reimbursements, before adding tangential features like tutorials for handling back pain and guided meditations. Hammer praised Samuelian-Werve for using insurance as a “wedge” to expand into more markets, eventually offering an “AI doctor” to diagnose and dispense advice. Samulian-Werve likes to describe Alan’s goal as enabling people to live past 100.
His family history – including the death of his grandfather from lung cancer and his parents’ careers as psychiatrists – became part of his pitch. “He had this combination of vision and passion that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have in spades,” recalled Avid Larizadeh Duggan, a senior managing director with Teachers’ Venture Growth, who met Samuelian-Werve six years ago. Duggan’s fund went on to lead Alan’s 2022 funding round.
Samuelian-Werve walks in prestigious circles. He met Duggan at Brilliant Minds, an exclusive networking event started by Spotify’s co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek. Roxanne Varza, the head of Parisian tech incubator Station F, said Samuelian-Werve is “very well connected” with French billionaires and financial titans. Philippe Englebert, a banker with Lazard and early Mistral investor, called him “a war machine in execution.”
Alan grew mostly through corporate partnerships, adding some 32,000 corporate clients and reaching €500 million in annualized recurring revenue to start 2025. In October, the company opened operations in Canada and introduced an AI chatbot, called Mo, designed to answer health questions.
Now, he’s pushing for the same success at Mistral, pitching the company as a pillar of geopolitical sovereignty in Europe. He says he’s been funneling potential corporate customers to the company and even joining sales meetings, providing a “fairly high volume of inbound and sales team support.”
Unlike Alan, Mistral has never publicly disclosed its revenue or how many customers it has. Samuelian-Werve acknowledged that Mistral doesn’t share the same transparency as his other company. “For such an exposed company, I understand that communicating very little makes people start to tell stories,” he said, adding that the company was preparing for a “wave of” announcements. He declined to say when and what they would be.