Guillaume Lample

Guillaume Lample cofounded Mistral AI in 2023 raising $113 million from investors in what was then Europe's largest ever seed round.

​​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.

The French AI researcher met his future cofounder Arthur Mensch while studying at Paris' elite college École Polytechnique. Lample would later complete a master's degree in artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University.

Lample worked for Meta as part of the Facebook AI Research team responsible for launching its open source model Llama in 2024. There he work with his future Mistral cofounder Timothee Lacroix.