Mistral AI has acquired Pimento, a Paris-based genetic artificial intelligence company that creates advertising content, as part of its third acquisition this year. The acquisition was first reported on Monday by L'Informé, and Mistral confirmed it to AFP the same day, citing a price of "several million euros."
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Two sources have now shared different numbers for the deal. L'Informé reported that Mistral will pay around 3.8 million euros. On Tuesday, Sifted reported that the deal is worth 12.7 million euros in cash and shares, based on documents it reviewed. Sifted's figure clearly includes shares, but it is unclear whether L'Informé does. Mistral has not confirmed either amount, and we have not independently verified them.
Mistral is primarily interested in the Pimento team. The company says that Pimento staff will join its engineering and product teams to work on Vibe, its conversational assistant, previously known as Le Chat. Pimento co-founder Florent Facqalso said on LinkedIn, as reported by Maddyness, that the team will focus on improving Vibe’s user experience.
A person familiar with the deal told L'Informé that Mistral is more interested in the skills of Pimento's developers than its customer base. Pimento's customer base is still significant: the company's website says it works with over 180 brands, and its software turns briefs, brand identities and campaign data into ad visuals and short animations for social media.
This is quite a departure from its beginnings. Facq and Tomás Yany, a former AI researcher at Apple, founded Pimento in October 2022 as a moodboarding tool for creative teams. In December 2023, it raised €3 million in seed funding led by Partech and Cygni Capital. Angel investors included Hugging Face co-founder Julien Chaumond and Dust co-founder Stanislas Polu.
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The timing is remarkable. On September 8, Mistral announced a Series D round worth €3 billion, giving the company a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion. Samsung Electronics led the investment, with EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity as co-leads. Mistral called the round the largest equity raise for a European technology company.
Pimento now joins a short but growing list of acquisitions. In February, Mistral made its first acquisition, agreeing to buy Koyeb, a Paris-based serverless cloud platform, to bolster its Mistral Compute infrastructure business. In May, the company also launched Emmi AI, an Austrian startup that develops physics simulation models for industrial engineering, and has a team of more than 30 people joining Mistral’s science and applied AI teams. Details of the terms were not disclosed.
Each of the deals focused on a different area: first infrastructure, then industrial engineering, and now consumer assistant, where Mistral competes directly with ChatGPT and Gemini. Pimento is the first of the three to launch a product aimed at marketers. Neither company has said what will happen to Pimento's current advertising tool or the brands that pay for it, and L'Informé has noted that the future of the advertising business remains unresolved.
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For now, people are moving to Vibe. The price involved will, according to the medium, be either negligible given the €3 billion increase or slightly higher.
