Mistral AI has acquired Pimento, a Paris-based generative AI company that creates advertising content, as part of its third acquisition this year.
The acquisition was first mentioned on Monday by L’Informé, and Mistral confirmed it to AFP the same day, citing a price of “several million euros”.
Two sources have now shared different numbers for the deal. L’Informé said Mistral would pay about €3.8 million. On Tuesday, Sifted reported the deal is worth €12.7 million in cash and shares, based on documents it reviewed.
Sifted’s number clearly includes equity, but it’s unclear if L’Informé’s does. Mistral has not confirmed either figure, and we have not independently verified them.
Mistral is mainly interested in Pimento’s team. The company says Pimento’s staff will join its engineering and product teams to work on Vibe, its conversational assistant, formerly known as Le Chat.
Pimento co-founder Florent Facq also said on LinkedIn, as reported by Maddyness, that the team will focus on improving Vibe’s user experience.
Someone familiar with the deal told L’Informé that Mistral cares more about 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 different from its start. 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.
The timing is notable. On September 8, Mistral announced a Series D round worth €3 billion, giving the company a post-money valuation of over €21 billion.
Samsung Electronics led the investment, along with the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity as co-leads. Mistral called this the largest equity round ever for a European tech company.
Pimento is now joining a brief but growing list of acquisitions; in February, Mistral made its first acquisition, agreeing to buy Koyeb, a serverless cloud platform based in Paris, to strengthen its Mistral Compute infrastructure business.
In May, the company also launched Emmi AI, a startup from Austria that develops physics simulation models for industrial engineering, and has a team of over 30 people joining Mistral’s science and applied AI groups. Details of the terms were not made public.
Each of the deals has focused on a different area: first on infrastructure, then on industrial engineering, and now on the consumer-facing assistant, where Mistral is in direct competition with ChatGPT and Gemini. Pimento is the first of the three to launch a product targeted at marketers.
Neither company has stated what will happen to Pimento’s current advertising tool or to the brands paying for it, and L’Informé has pointed out that the future of the ad business remains unresolved.
For the moment, the people are moving to Vibe. The price involved will, according to the outlet, be either negligible given the €3 billion increase or slightly higher.