If you’ve been following the AI industry, Mistral should be a familiar name by now. The French AI startup with a $6 billion valuation is arguably the biggest AI company working on foundation models in Europe.
Alan, on the other hand, isn’t as well known. The health insurance unicorn has been quietly growing to become a digital companion for your health. Over 680,000 people are covered by Alan’s insurance in a handful of countries.
The connection between those two companies is Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, Alan’s co-founder CEO and Mistral’s co-founding advisor.
Bloomberg’s published a curious story explaining his role and some insights into Mistral’s origin story. “Arthur Mensch is the public face of French AI champion Mistral, but another startup’s CEO has been critical to its $6 billion valuation,” Bloomberg wrote. While Samuelian-Werve has been listed as a co-founding advisor since the inception of Mistral, no one had quite ascribed so much credit to him in the founding and growth of the French AI company.
According to Bloomberg, Samuelian-Werve saw the AI boom coming before the release of ChatGPT. He first reached out to Xavier Niel, the telecom billionaire behind Station F and Kima Ventures, to create an AI non-profit.
But when Samuelian-Werve met Arthur Mensch and Mistral’s other co-founders, he dropped the non-profit idea in favor of what is now known as Mistral. It’s around that same time that Alan’s other co-founder and CTO Charles Gorintin as well as former digital minister Cédric O also became founding advisors to the Paris-based AI juggernaut.
According to Bloomberg, Samuelian-Werve convinced Lightspeed to lead Mistral’s seed round and contacted many of the investors who ended up backing the AI startup. We have reached out to Mistral for a response to the story, and the credit it ascribes to Samuelian-Werve in its founding and growth. We will update this post with any new information we receive.
In February 2024, Samuelian-Werve mentioned his interest in artificial intelligence when he presented Alan’s financial results.
“We continue to invest in AI throughout Alan. As you may know, I’m a co-founder and board member of Misral. But that just represents the fact that we’ve been investing for a very long time in AI at Alan — even before the generative AI buzz — both to reduce our management costs, be the most efficient on the market, provide the best services, and also to create new services,” Samuelian-Werve said at the time. “And certainly in 2024 we’ll be announcing some new services that are related to generative AI and that are very exciting for us.”
In November 2024, Alan introduced an AI-powered chatbot called Mo. What makes Mo different from regular chatbots is that answers are checked by a doctor within 15 minutes. They can either confirm the medical advice or correct what has been said in the conversation.
As for Xavier Niel? He ended up funding Kyutai, a French AI research lab focused on (truly) open-source AI development. But he didn’t completely part ways with Mistral, as he also invested in Mistral’s seed round.
Today, Mistral’s office is still located in the same building as Alan’s office, near the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. Samuelian-Werve and Mensch still meet once a week to discuss Mistral’s strategy. Alan is also a shareholder in Mistral.
In the Bloomberg profile, Samuelian-Werve reiterated that Mistral is not for sale, confirming what Mensch said a few days ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos. This topic — as well as the connection between Alan and Mistral — will certainly come up once again next month during the AI Action Summit in Paris. But it’s worth remembering that you often hear that a company is not for sale when a company is for sale — or at least that some shareholders are exerting pressure to sell.
