French AI lab Mistral AI is reportedly in early talks to raise a hefty €3 billion (about $3.5 billion), according to Bloomberg, which cited anonymous sources who clearly know how to keep a secret.

The funding round would value the company at around €20 billion (approximately $23.15 billion), which is nearly double the €11.7 billion it was worth back in September when it closed its Series C. Because who doesn't love a good valuation doubling?

Mistral, launched in 2023 with the lofty goal of 'putting frontier AI in the hands of everyone,' has taken a more open approach than its American counterparts. They offer some foundational large language models with open weights, so anyone can customize them as they see fit. For those who prefer their AI locked down, they also have closed models for programming, voice cloning, and optical character recognition.

In these times of European tech skepticism, Mistral has cleverly positioned itself as a 'sovereign' and homegrown alternative. They're building a data center near Paris and have partnered with France's army, the government of Luxembourg, and several major European companies. Nothing says sovereignty like cozying up to the military.

Still, Mistral has only raised about $4 billion to date (per PitchBook), which is a drop in the bucket compared to OpenAI's $186 billion and Anthropic's $161.25 billion. Those American labs are also valued much higher, reflecting how far ahead they are in revenue, model adoption, and enterprise demand. But hey, who needs billions when you have charm?

Mistral did not immediately return a request for comment, probably because they were busy counting their potential billions.