Welcome back. The main thing happening today is Mistral pulling off Europe's biggest-ever tech raise. Live from 12–3 BST. Here's your Order of Play.
WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY
Three years in, Mistral just became the biggest fundraise European tech has ever produced.
The French AI lab has raised €3 billion at a €21 billion valuation, making it the biggest equity round ever for a private European tech company. Samsung led the round, with the EU’s Scaleup Europe Fund and chip equipment maker ASML also taking part.
CEO Arthur Mensch says the funding removes a "key bottleneck" and gives Mistral the hardware it needs to train frontier models at a level "very comparable to what the Chinese labs have." Samsung has its own reasons for investing. It wants to use Mistral’s AI in its chip factories, much like ASML, which invested €1.3 billion last year. If the companies making the world’s most advanced machines are backing your AI and putting it to work in their factories, that’s a pretty strong vote of confidence.
With Anthropic raising around $100 billion this year and heading towards an IPO that could value it at nearly $2 trillion, Mistral is facing a very different reality. The French AI company is nowhere near that scale and has focused on picking its spots, from frontier models and cloud services to cybersecurity for European banks.
We're getting into all of it on today's show at 12 BST.
YESTERDAY’S MOMENT
NASASpaceflight host Ryan Caton came on the show to explain why there isn't really a separate "space economy."
"If space was suddenly going to stop existing, so many things would stop working. Millions of people would immediately no longer have internet." Then there's the stuff nobody thinks about. "Financial services would stop working, because their timings are judged off GPS satellites. And speaking of GPS, you wouldn't be able to get anywhere anymore, because your phone GPS wouldn't work. The entire economy is tied to space."
A timely reminder, days after Europe's first private orbital launch, that whoever controls space controls a lot more than satellites.
Watch the full clip below.
YESTERDAY’S BANGER OF THE DAY
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Luke & Ronan
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