$24bn AI lab co-founded by an ex-Jane Street intern doesn't like hiring quants as much as OpenAI
It's a big day for French AI Lab Mistral. It raised €3bn (~$3.5bn), giving it a valuation of roughly $24.4bn. It's the largest ever fundraise by a private European technology company, and will surely lead to a boom in hiring, but Mistral doesn't have the exact same profile for talent as the bigger US labs.
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Mistral has a headcount of more than 900, of which hundreds are research scientists. Like the major labs, it predominantly hires these from tech firms or academia. Guillaume Lample, Mistral's chief scientist who made his name at Facebook, said on a podcast in March that Mistral is making a lot of hires but wants to keep its team "efficient," small and "very agile."
You don't often see Mistral hire someone from finance; only a handful have worked at the major quant firms, and in almost all cases they've only interned there. OpenAI, by contrast, has previously hosted dinners for high-frequency trading staff with a few years of experience, and offered them pay packages of up to $3m to tempt them over. In OpenAI and Anthropic, 5-10% of technical staff members appear to be ex-finance (judging by LinkedIn), but Mistral touts far fewer numbers.
It's curious, then, that Lample, is himself a former Jane Street intern. He may have concluded that three months in finance is enough.
There are other reasons that Mistral might not hire finance alums. Its primary base is Paris; despite being home to the Grandes Ecoles, the city is not one of the major cities for electronic trading in Europe; London and Amsterdam are much bigger hubs for talent.
Lample said on the podcast that Mistral only has a "small team in London." Companies House accounts for 'Mistral AI UK Ltd' suggest that it had just six people in London at the start of 2025, although it has grown rapidly and appears to have grown headcount to ~100 today according to LinkedIn.
In the US, meanwhile it seems to employ the bulk of its AI scientists in Palo Alto, California. The H1B Visa database shows it pays an average of $300k to research scientists in the city. Lample said that Mistral has "some presence in New York," but it appears minute.
Lample said Mistral also hires remotely, and is focused on "hiring very strong people" who are "strong believers in science." Many quant trading graduate hires only have bachelors and might need extra training to understand the deeper science, which could have been seen as an unnecessary cost in the past. With an extra $3.4bn for Mistral to work with, that could change.
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