I would make a wild guess that this is a policital invesment. It's hard to believe Mistral is the right choice to throw in 1.7B€ for economic reason.

> It’s hard to believe that Mistral isn’t the right choice to invest €1.7B in for economic reasons.

Why? Cursor, essentially a VSCode fork, is valued at $10B. Perplexity AI, which, as far as I'm informed, doesn't have its own foundational models, boasts a market capitalisation of $20B, according to recent news. Yet Mistral sits at just a $14B.

Meanwhile, Mistral was at the forefront of the LLM take-off, developing foundational (very lean, performant and innovative at the time) models from scratch and releasing them openly. They set up an API service, integrated with businesses, building custom models and fine-tunes, and secured partnership agreements. They launched user-facing interface and mobile app which are on par with leading companies, kept pace with "reasoning" and "research" advancements; and, in short, built a solid, commercially viable portfolio. So why on earth should Mistral AI be valued lower? Let alone have its mere €1.7B investment questioned.

Edit: Apologies, I misread your quote and missed the "isn't" part.

Since 2024, it's hard to make an investment that has no political nature.