Mistral's Pimento Deal Is Priced at €3.8 Million or €12.7 Million, Depending on Who You Read

Mistral AI bought Paris advertising-content startup Pimento, in a deal reported on September 23, for a price that two outlets report differently: about €3.8 million according to L'Informé, and €12.7 million in cash and shares according to Sifted, which says it reviewed documents. Mistral's own statement, as relayed by The Next Web, says only "several million euros".

The gap is 3.3 times. Both figures are second-hand to this publication, which has seen neither the filings nor a company breakdown, so the defensible statement is that the deal is announced, completed by Mistral's account, and priced somewhere between the two.

Two prices, one deal

Source	Reported price	Basis
L'Informé	About €3.8 million	Not specified in The Next Web's summary
Sifted	€12.7 million, cash and shares	Documents Sifted reviewed
Mistral	"Several million euros"	Company statement

A cash-and-shares price can read as two numbers if one report counts only part of it. That is a hypothesis, not a finding: neither report in hand splits the amount between cash and shares.

What Pimento was

Pimento was founded in October 2022 by Florent Facq and Tomás Yany, a former Apple AI researcher. It generates ad visuals and animations for social media from briefs, brand identities and campaign data, and works with more than 180 brands.

Its last disclosed financing was a €3 million seed in December 2023 led by Partech and Cygni Capital, with angels including Julien Chaumond, a Hugging Face co-founder, and Stanislas Polu, a Dust co-founder. Against that seed, the higher price is 4.2 times the money raised and the lower is 1.3 times. Which of those is right decides whether the seed investors, Partech and Cygni Capital among them, roughly broke even or made a modest return, before any later round that has not been reported.

Mistral's interest is the team more than the product line. Pimento's staff are joining the engineering and product groups working on Vibe, the assistant formerly called Le Chat.

The size of the buyer

On September 8, Mistral announced a €3 billion Series D at a post-money valuation above €21 billion, led by Samsung Electronics with the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity as co-leads. TechCrunch also lists a16z, Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, Advent and BlackRock among the backers.

Set against that, the €12.7 million figure is about 0.4% of the round and about 0.06% of the post-money valuation. The €3.8 million figure is about 0.13% of the round. Either way, the Pimento price is small against Mistral's balance sheet, so the discrepancy matters more to Pimento's early investors than to the buyer.

1. Sifted: cash and shares12.7 € million
2. L'Informé: about3.8 € million
3. Pimento seed, Dec. 20233 € million

Source: The Next Web (citing L'Informé and Sifted), accessed 2026-10-03

A third purchase in 2026

The Next Web counts Pimento as Mistral's third acquisition of 2026, after Koyeb, a Paris serverless cloud platform, in February, and Emmi AI, an Austrian physics-simulation startup with more than 30 people, in May. None of the three is a model company. For another European lab, see our coverage of Aleph Alpha's Kolibri release, and for how a rival AI company is priced, Cognition's valuation.

The next observable item is a filing or a company statement that splits the Pimento price into cash and shares. Until one appears, the €3.8 million and €12.7 million figures stand side by side.