French Startup Enters Competitive Market with ‘Mistral Code’

French AI startup Mistral is making waves in the tech industry with the launch of its own AI-powered coding assistant, Mistral Code. This new tool aims to compete with established players like Windsurf, Anysphere’s Cursor, and GitHub Copilot by bundling a range of features, including AI-powered coding models, an in-IDE assistant, local deployment options, and enterprise tools.

Mistral Code is built on the open-source project Continue and is available in private beta for JetBrains development platforms and Microsoft’s VS Code. The company claims that its goal is to deliver best-in-class coding models to enterprise developers, enabling features such as instant completions and multi-step refactoring through an integrated platform.

Mistral’s AI-powered coding assistant is powered by a combination of in-house models, including Codestral for code autocomplete, Codestral Embed for code search and retrieval, Devstral for “agentic” coding tasks, and Mistral Medium for chat assistance. The client supports more than 80 programming languages and can reason over files, terminal outputs, and issues.

Mistral claims that several major companies, including consulting firm Capgemini, Spanish and Portuguese bank Abanca, and French national railway company SNCF, are already using Mistral Code in production. The company also notes that customers can fine-tune or post-train the underlying models on private repositories or distill lightweight variants.

This move into the AI-powered coding assistant market comes as the technology gains popularity among developers. A recent poll found that 76% of developers have used or plan to use AI tools in their development processes last year. The increasing adoption of AI-powered coding assistants is driven by their promise to boost coding productivity and improve code quality.

Mistral is backed by venture investors like General Catalyst and has raised over €1.1 billion to date. The company plans to continue making improvements to Mistral Code and contribute at least a portion of those upgrades to the Continue open-source project. Founded in 2023, Mistral is a frontier model lab building a range of AI-powered services, including a chatbot platform, Le Chat, and mobile apps.

The launch of Mistral Code marks a significant milestone for the company, which is positioning itself as a major player in the AI-powered coding assistant market. With its focus on delivering best-in-class coding models and its commitment to open-source development, Mistral is likely to attract attention from developers and enterprises alike.

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