Mistral AI, the French artificial intelligence company valued at €11.7 billion, unveiled its third-generation optical character recognition model on Tuesday, positioning document digitization as the critical first step enterprises must take before realizing the full potential of generative AI.The new model, called Mistral OCR 3, claims a 74% win rate against competing products when processing forms, scanned documents, complex tables, and handwritten content. Mistral priced the technology aggressively at $2 per 1,000 pages — with a 50% discount for batch processing — dramatically undercutting many established enterprise document processing solutions.The release arrives at a pivotal moment for the two-year-old startup. Mistral has spent December on an aggressive product offensive, launching its Mistral 3 family of open-weight models, new coding tools called Devstral 2, and now OCR 3. The company faces intensifying pressure from American rivals flush with capital — OpenAI recently sold secondary shares at a reported $500 billion valuation, while Anthropic raised $13 billion in September — and potential regulatory friction as the Trump administration threatens retaliation against European companies over EU technology laws.Why enterprises can’t adopt AI until they solve their paper problemMarjorie Janiewicz, Mistral’s Chief Revenue Officer who oversees global revenue including solutions architecture and forward deployment engineering, framed the OCR release as a direct response to patterns the company observed while helping enterprises deploy AI over the past year.”A lot of very large enterprises are still sitting on a very large volume of critical data that’s not digitized yet,” Janiewicz said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “That data that’s not digitized represents a massive competitive moat.”The observation cuts to the heart of a widely documented problem in enterpr …
