creators

Arthur Mensch — Mistral AI co-founder and CEO

Arthur Mensch co-founded Mistral AI in Paris in April 2023 and runs it as CEO. He was a DeepMind research scientist and worked on Flamingo and Chinchilla.

Arthur Mensch, born on 17 July 1992 in Sevres, is a French machine-learning researcher and the co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI. He studied at Ecole Polytechnique, then took parallel master's degrees at Telecom Paris and in the Mathematics, Vision, Learning (MVA) programme at ENS Paris-Saclay. From 2015 to 2018 he did a PhD at Inria on predictive models and stochastic optimisation for large-scale functional brain imaging, supervised by Bertrand Thirion, Gael Varoquaux and Julien Mairal, then postdoctoral work at ENS Paris on optimal transport and stochastic optimisation, with a spell at NYU's Courant Institute. He joined DeepMind's Paris lab in late 2020 as a research scientist and spent close to three years on large language models, multimodal systems and retrieval-augmented architectures. He is a co-author of the Flamingo visual language model and of 'Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models', the Chinchilla scaling paper. He left DeepMind in May 2023. Mistral AI was established in April 2023 in Paris with Guillaume Lample and Timothee Lacroix, both previously at Meta; Mensch has been chief executive from the start. The company builds open-weight models and sells them to enterprises as a European alternative to the big American labs. In September 2026 Mistral said it had raised 3 billion euros at a post-money valuation above 21 billion euros, led by Samsung Electronics with EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity as co-leads, and that it now works with more than 125 enterprises across 20 countries. TIME named him to its TIME100 AI list in 2024.

Specialization

foundation models, open-weight LLMs, machine learning research, European AI industry

Country

France