Mistral raises €3B led by Samsung, Anker and Ezviz go local-AI at IFA, DeepCtrls lands CATL round

Mistral’s new backers include Samsung, the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity. A year ago, Mistral was valued at €11.7 billion after a round led by Dutch chip-equipment maker ASML. Chief executive Arthur Mensch told CNBC that the funds will go into building data centers and renting compute capacity. “Long term, the plan is to fully rely on capacity that we are building ourselves, and so that means that the amount of compute that we own is going to grow … around 100% in the next five years,” Mensch said.

In the same interview, Mensch said Mistral is trying a different approach from OpenAI and Anthropic: it works with individual companies to create custom AI tools and integrate them into operations, for example in ASML’s manufacturing process. He said the company would focus on a similar collaboration with Samsung. He said earlier this year that annual recurring revenue should exceed $1 billion in 2026; with the new funding and partnerships, he expects “to be beating” that figure “if everything happens as they are trending,” but he declined to give a revised figure. Mensch also positioned Mistral as an open-weight, non-U.S. and non-Chinese alternative for customers seeking “sovereign AI,” and said models the company will release “very soon” will be “very competitive.” On Chinese AI labs, Mensch said they are not operating with enterprise customers outside China; their models can sometimes be deployed on Mistral’s infrastructure, but this does not create a strong dependency because data stays with Mistral. “At this point in time, we are seeing that the volatility in this space is actually quite extreme,” he said, adding that customers need a provider that can guarantee better models one year from now.

Anker’s IFA-related announcements came on Sept. 3 in Berlin, one day before the trade fair opened. According to Chinese tech media Leiphone, Anker said it would unify Anker, Anker SOLIX, eufy, eufyMake and soundcore under one Anker brand. Europe generated 4.432 billion yuan in revenue for Anker in the first half of 2026, up 29.34% year on year and accounting for 26.69% of the company total; the company also said it would open its first direct store in Germany. CMO Jia Jingdong was quoted by Leiphone as saying: “In the era when categories were independent, it made sense to build category brands; today, a new era has arrived,” and that brand unification is intended to deliver a “seamless smart experience” through a single brand.

At IFA, Anker showed what the new era means in hardware. Its Thus chip, a neural-network compute-in-memory audio processor first announced in April, has now been embedded in multiple headphone styles, including over-ear, in-ear and open-ear models. According to Leiphone, Thus A1 provides about 5 G FLOPS of computing power, roughly 150 times the 30 M FLOPS of a typical Bluetooth chip, and its architecture cuts energy lost in moving data between memory and compute. Devices using the chip include the AeroClip 2 Pro earphones, which transcribe, summarize and answer questions about recordings entirely on-device, and an over-the-counter hearing aid that uses local AI to isolate speech in noisy environments. Anker also introduced Sleep A40 Pro, a sleep-aid earbud whose sensing-intervention-validation loop adjusts audio from real-time heart-rate and sleep-cycle data.

For the home, Anker presented MindBase, a home AI data hub with a 6-TOPS NPU, an eufy AI Core expansion card and two drive bays capable of storing up to 48 TB. According to Leiphone, MindBase connects to Anker’s security, energy, cleaning and audio products and supports third-party Matter devices, as well as Apple Home, Amazon Alexa and Google Home, through the EasyOmni Link platform. The company said all AI inference and data processing stays local, with no cloud upload or monthly fee. A booth demonstration of a miniature smart home ran more than 30 scenes, including one in which the security agent, robot vacuum and energy-storage system reacted together when the occupants left the house.

Ezviz appeared at IFA on Sept. 4. Citing IDC data, Leiphone said the Chinese company was the world’s biggest maker of consumer surveillance cameras in 2025, shipping 18.9 million units and holding a 13.2% share in a market that grew only 2.2% that year. Ezviz’s camera revenue rose 7.87% to 3.18 billion yuan in 2025, with gross margin of 39.33%. Its Berlin exhibit covered five self-developed categories: smart home cameras, smart entry, service robots, smart control and smart wearables.

Ezviz’s pitch in Berlin centered on a cloud-edge-device architecture that combines its Blue Ocean large model, launched in June 2024, with the EZVIZ AI CoreX local reasoning hub introduced in April 2026, according to Leiphone. The model is able to recognize 1,200 types of household objects, and the local hub performs AI inference without cloud dependency. Overseas revenue rose 22.27% to 2.338 billion yuan in 2025 and reached 1.29 billion yuan, or 42.89% of total revenue, in the first half of 2026. Ezviz sells through European chains including MediaMarkt, FNAC, Boulanger, Darty, Leroy Merlin and Bauhaus. The company said that in 2026 its video doorbells and smart cat-eye cameras were Amazon No. 1 sellers in Spain and France, its smart cat-eye was No. 1 in Italy, and the combined doorbell-and-cat-eye category was No. 1 in Germany.

Chinese physical-AI startup DeepCtrls said in a statement distributed by QbitAI that it had closed a B+ round of several hundred million yuan. CATL led the round; Aramco Ventures, Taiping Innovation Investment, GF Xinde and Fosun Chuangfu joined, and existing investors Source Code Capital and Guangyuan Capital added to their stakes. The statement said the company has completed three consecutive financing rounds over the past two months. DeepCtrls says it has focused since 2018 on fusing AI with physical principles and applying its PhyAI engine to industrial and data-center environments; it counts hundreds of large enterprises as customers. Its liquid-cooling intelligent controls and computing-power and electricity coordination products are intended as an AI brain for energy and computing infrastructure. Founder and CEO Li Hui was quoted as saying: “The second half of AI is moving from ‘thinking’ in the digital world to ‘control’ in the physical world,” adding that whoever can autonomously optimize and control physical systems will hold the long-term initiative in AI.

Editor’s Summary: Mistral’s Samsung-led €3 billion round values the French AI developer at more than €21 billion and reinforces Europe’s bid for sovereign AI. At IFA 2026, Anker unified five brands around on-device AI and Ezviz demonstrated how its local large-model strategy can expand in a slow-growing surveillance-camera market. DeepCtrls’ CATL-backed B+ round, meanwhile, signals investor appetite for physical-AI controls on energy and computing infrastructure.