According to Bloomberg, Apple is seriously considering the acquisition of the French artificial intelligence start-up company Mistral. The latter raised a total of 1.1 billion euros in seven rounds of financing. In June last year, the company raised 600 million euros in round B financing, under the auspices of the Moscow Investment Group, DST Global, and the United States Windward Company, General Catalest.
Recently, Bloomberg reported that the company was negotiating with investors to raise up to $1 billion. In addition to equity financing, the company is also in discussions with lending institutions on the “billions of euros of debt” financing. Over the years, Mistral has introduced a series of large and small language models with a remarkable success in its optical character recognition (OCR) function. In addition, its chat robot Le Chat is well known for responding quickly to user queries. The company is currently the largest artificial intelligence start-up in Europe, valued at €5.8 billion.
In the context of this initiative, there have been reports of internal discussions among their executives about the acquisition of the United States artificial intelligence start-up company Perplexity. However, Perplexity’s leadership diluted the discussions and stated that they were “not aware of any current or future merger discussions”. The acquisition of an AI start-up will provide much-needed impetus to the Apple ‘ s AI ecosystem, which has been facing criticism and user dissatisfaction over the past two years. In addition, the company has experienced changes in talent and leadership. The Apple’s “excellent engineer” and base model team manager Ruming Pang recently left and joined Meta. Meta reportedly provides it with an annual remuneration programme worth tens of millions of dollars.
Tom Gunter, another senior researcher for Apple, has also left the company. Gunter worked with Apple for eight years, and his colleagues thought that he was “hard to replace because of his unique combination of skills”. Against the background of these advances, Apple has been exploring the use of a third-party AI model to improve the latest upgrade of its virtual assistant, Siri, on its consumer equipment. The roll-out of a completely upgraded version of Siri, which the company had been working hard to achieve, had been delayed to 2026.
