Timothée Lacroix

Timothée Lacroix cofounded Mistral AI in 2023 raising $113 million from investors in what was then Europe's largest ever seed round. He's the company's chief technology offier.

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 Guillaume Lample while working for Meta in its AI Research Lab after studying at Paris' École Normale Supérieure.

The pair worked together on Meta's open source Llama large language model before resigning in 2023..