Arthur Mensch

Mensch trained in France's elite engineering and machine-learning programs and worked as a research scientist at Google DeepMind in Paris, where he contributed to work on large language models. In April 2023 he co-founded Mistral AI with two former Meta researchers who had worked on Llama.

Under his leadership Mistral raised one of Europe's largest seed rounds and quickly shipped efficient open-weight models — Mistral 7B and the Mixtral mixture-of-experts line — that punched far above their size, alongside commercial flagships and the Le Chat assistant.

Mensch has become a prominent voice in European technology policy, arguing for open models and for Europe's ability to build sovereign AI capacity. A 2025 round led by ASML valued Mistral among Europe's most valuable startups, reinforcing his role as the continent's answer to the US and Chinese labs.