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by vb-8448 22 days ago
No one in Europe will buy from a random startup, the consultancy part is a MUST to do businesses with big corps, banks, finances, insurances, governs, public administration ...
1 comments

Mistral is a startup that happened to raise 100M. I said in my comment a “country backed startup”, which mistral is
The "consultancy" is their moat: if there are already in the company they will catch up most of the opportunities despite not having the SOTA model.

In Europe procurement cycles are insane, if you are somehow a "trusted vendor" you get a priority line, otherwise you need a lot of political support or ties with some C-level in a company.

Moreover, a lot of companies don't want to send their data to external providers(unless it's Microsoft, but it's a different story ...)