Arthur Mensch

Arthur Mensch cofounded Mistral AI in 2023 raising $113 million from investors in what was then Europe's largest ever seed round. He is chief executive.

​​The Paris-based company builds open-weight large language models that compete with U.S. rivals like OpenAI, and raised $2 billion on a $14 billion valuation in September 2025.

Mensch was born and grew up in a Paris suburb to a mother who taught physics, and a father who ran a tech company.

The French AI researcher met his future cofounder Guillaume Lample while studying at Paris' elite college École Polytechnique. Mensch would later complete a doctorate in machine learning at Université Paris-Saclay.

Mensch worked for DeepMind at its Paris office and helped work on an early version of Google's Gemini large language model before cofounding Mistral.