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While the AI market has in recent days seemed to collapse around DeepSeek and OpenAI, there are of course many other teams of brilliant engineers fielding large language models (LLMs) that are worth a look as a user or enterprise seeking to leverage the latest and greatest.
Take Mistral AI, the French startup that made headlines even before it launched with a record-setting seed funding round for Europe of $640 million, and which has quietly been training and releasing a mix of open source and proprietary models for consumers and enterprises.
Even as the rise of new reasoning models and agents have dominated the AI landscape recently, Mistral is still positioning itself as a viable alternative to OpenAI’s signature chatbot ChatGPT and DeepSeek’s hit mobile app, especially for those concerned with data privacy and security.
Today, Mistral finally launched its own free, mobile version of its chatbot Le Chat for iOS and Android, as well as a new Enterprise tier for private infrastructure, and a Pro plan at $14.99 per month, the move suggests that Mistral AI is making a concerted push to convince companies there are worthwhile alternatives to DeepSeek and OpenAI.
Mistral’s le Chat offers business leaders an AI tool that integrates with enterprise environments, operates with high-speed performance, and—importantly for some customers—does not send user data to China, unlike DeepSeek.
Mistral targets both consumer and enterprise with savvy new releases
Mistral AI’s latest rollout comes at a time when enterprises are increasingly evaluating AI partners based on data privacy, security, and deployment flexibility.
The launch of le Chat’s Enterprise tier, which allows businesses to deploy the assistant on private infrastructure, SaaS, or virtual private cloud (VPC), suggests that Mistral is targeting the same corporate users who may have previously considered OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Anthropic’s Claude but want more control over their data and models.
Mistral’s strategy mirrors a recent move by DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company that released DeepSeek-R1, a powerful reasoning model that offers capabilities and performance similar to OpenAI’s “o” series of models (o1, o1-mini, o3-mini out now with o3 full to follow soon) but at a fraction of the lost (30 times less expensive for ent …