Mistral Seeks to Grow Enterprise Customer Base Through Cloudera Partnership

Mistral is partnering with American data and software company Cloudera in an effort to grow its enterprise customer base by building exposure to highly regulated industries that are increasingly turning to advanced artificial-intelligence models.

Enterprise customers—including large financial institutions, healthcare groups and government agencies—are crucial for companies like ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral because they have the financial firepower to pay for AI tools at scale, providing a steady revenue stream for AI labs.

As regulation across industries grows, particularly in Europe, so does the need for AI labs to provide sovereign AI—tools that enterprise clients can leverage for their own needs in a way that keeps all data under their control.

Mistral said it was partnering with Cloudera to meet growing demand for sovereign AI: The French AI startup will integrate its models with Cloudera’s hybrid data platform over the coming weeks so that enterprises can deploy and train them with proprietary data within controlled environments.

The announcement comes days after Mistral completed a funding round led by South Korea’s Samsung Electronics that lifted its valuation above $24 billion.

Joining forces with Cloudera will bolster Mistral’s exposure to clients across regulated industries as enterprises seek increasingly capable AI models to streamline their operations.

“We’re getting access to 30 exabytes of really differentiated, proprietary data,” Kamal Brar, Mistral’s senior vice president of partnerships and alliances, said in an interview. “Access to the base of those regulated customers is extremely important to us.”

Founded in 2008 by former Google, Yahoo and Oracle employees, California-based Cloudera provides software that allows clients to oversee their data and deploy AI so they can cut costs, boost productivity and improve their financial performance.

Cloudera operates in nearly 100 countries, serving clients across financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and life sciences, oil and gas, and the public sector.

“These are all highly regulated industries,” Abhas Ricky, Cloudera’s chief business officer and general manager for applied AI, said in an interview. “Of course, we have a little bit of retail, we have a little bit of manufacturing as well, but a very significant percentage—over 65% to 70%—of our annual recurring revenue is tied to highly regulated industries.”

Mistral has been shoring up its network of alliances lately. Last month, it expanded its collaboration with Microsoft to help enterprises adopt AI. In May, it agreed to bring its models to law firms and in-house legal teams by partnering with San Francisco-based startup Harvey AI.

Mistral Chief Revenue Officer Marjorie Janiewicz told The Wall Street Journal at the time that the company wanted to bolster its presence across regulated industries where companies need to control their data and customize models so they can better understand the nuances of the industry in which they operate.

The French startup is a staunch defender of open-weight models—those that are publicly available for anyone to download and modify—saying they give enterprises the flexibility to tailor them to their needs while protecting their data and intellectual property. Cloudera’s Ricky said the partnership reinforced both companies’ commitment to open weights and open source.

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