Tech
Mistral bets on ‘build-your-own AI’ as it takes on OpenAI, Anthropic in the enterprise
Most enterprise AI projects fail not because companies lack the technology, but because the models they’re using don’t understand their business. The models are often trained on the internet, rather than decades of internal documents, workflows, and institutional knowledge.
That gap is where Mistral, the French AI startup, sees opportunity. On Tuesday, the company announced Mistral Forge, a platform that lets enterprises build custom models trained on their own data. Mistral announced the platform at Nvidia GTC, Nvidia’s annual technology conference, which this year is focused heavily on AI and agentic models for enterprise.
It’s a pointed move for Mistral, a company that has built its business on corporate clients while rivals OpenAI and Anthropic have soared ahead in terms of consumer adoption. CEO Arthur Mensch says Mistral’s laser focus on the enterprise is working: The company is on track to surpass $1 billion in annual recurring revenue this year.
A big part of doubling down on enterprise is giving companies more control over their data and their AI systems, Mistral says.
“What Forge does is it lets enterprises and governments customize AI models for their specific needs,” Elisa Salamanca, Mistral’s head of product, told TechCrunch.
Several companies in the enterprise AI space already claim to offer similar capabilities, but most focus on fine-tuning existing models or layering proprietary data on top through techniques like retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These approaches don’t fundamentally retrain models; instead, they adapt or query them at runtime using company data.
Mistral, by contrast, says it is enabling companies to train models from scratch. In theory, this could address some of the limitations of more common approaches — for example, better handling of non-English or highly domain-specific data, and greater control over model behavior. It could also allow companies to train agentic systems using reinforcement learning and reduce reliance on third-party model providers, avoiding risks like model changes or deprecation.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Forge customers can build their custom models using Mistral’s wide library of open-weight AI models, which includes small models such as the recently introduced Mistral Small 4. According to Mistral co-founder and chief technologist, Timothée Lacroix, Forge can help unlock more value out of its existing models.
“The trade-offs that we make when we build smaller models is that they just cannot be as good on every topic as their larger counterparts, and so the ability to customize them lets us pick what we emphasize and what we drop,” Lacroix said.
Mistral advises on which models and infrastructure to use, but both decisions stay with the customer, Lacroix said. And for teams that need more than guidance, Forge comes with Mistral’s team of forward-deployed engineers who embed directly with customers to surface the right data and adapt to their needs — a model borrowed from the likes of IBM and Palantir.
“As a product, Forge already comes with all the tooling and infrastructure so you can generate synthetic data pipelines,” Salamanca said. “But understanding how to build the right evals and making sure that you have the right amount of data is something that enterprises usually don’t have the right expertise for, and that’s what the FDEs bring to the table.”
Mistral has already made Forge available to partners, including Ericsson, the European Space Agency, Italian consulting company Reply, and Singapore’s DSO and HTX. Early adopters also include ASML, the Dutch chipmaker that led Mistral’s Series C round last September at a €11.7 billion valuation (approximately $13.8 billion at the time).
These partnerships are emblematic of what Mistral expects Forge’s main use cases to be. According to Mistral’s chief revenue officer Marjorie Janiewicz, these include governments who need to tailor models for their language and culture; financial players with high compliance requirements; manufacturers with customization needs; and tech companies that need to tune models to their code base.
Tech
Gamma adds AI image-generation tools in bid to take on Canva and Adobe
Gamma, a platform that lets you use AI to create presentations and websites, is launching a new image-generation product for making marketing assets as it seeks to better compete with the likes of Canva and Adobe.
The company says its new product, called Gamma Imagine, will let users employ text prompts to create brand-specific assets like interactive charts and visualizations, marketing collateral, social graphics, and infographics. Gamma currently provides more than 100 templates, which you can use alongside its AI tools to build the kind of assets that you need.
To power its data-driven asset-generation features, the company is integrating with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Make, Zapier, Atlassian, n8n, and Superhuman Go.
“As we started working with a lot of our early users, we realized that in the presentations they want to create, there was a variety of graphical design use cases that they all also had,” Grant Lee, Gamma’s CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch. “So we worked alongside them to develop basically a new set of tools that allows them to go far beyond just the traditional presentation format,” he said.
Lee believes Gamma sits well between tools for professionals like Adobe or Figma, and legacy tools like Microsoft PowerPoint.
“We think we can serve the very long tail of knowledge workers and business professionals whose demand for their job is to communicate visually, but they just don’t have the tools. They need to pull in a design resource to be able to help with this stuff, and we want to make an-AI native approach that serves their needs in the sort of middle that we feel is really underserved,” he said.
Last November, Gamma raised $68 million in a Series B round led by a16z, at a $2.1 billion valuation. At that time, the company said it had ARR of $100 million and 70 million users. The company told TechCrunch that it is approaching 100 million users now.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Tech
Google’s data center power playbook comes into focus
Google may have signed on to President Trump’s toothless power pledge, but it’s clear the company started working months ago on a framework to power its data centers.
On Thursday, Google said it will work with Michigan utility DTE to add 2.7 gigawatts of “new resources” in suburban Detroit to power a new data center in the region. Some specifics are still fuzzy at this point, but the deal mimics one signed last month with Xcel Energy to build a data center in Minnesota. This is how Google will develop new capacity for its future data centers.
The new plan includes 1.6 gigawatts of solar power, 400 megawatts of four-hour energy storage, 50 megawatts of long-duration energy storage, and 300 megawatts of “additional clean resources,” which is a squishy way of saying anything from wind and hydro to nuclear and geothermal.
TechCrunch sent Google’s PR people a number of questions, and while they responded with some details, it’s clear there’s a lot to the proposal that either isn’t fleshed out or isn’t fully public yet. To wit: Does “clean resources” include natural gas? We haven’t received a reply on that one yet.
The remaining 350 megawatts of the 2.7 GW deal will be covered by demand response, which is when large electricity users curtail their use for brief periods of time. What shape that takes remains to be seen. Google may be looking for companies that are willing to dial back their electricity needs at certain times, or it will turn off its own data centers when the grid is strained.
The DTE deal will also use Google’s Clean Transition Tariff, which it has been refining over the past year or so. The tariff was previously used in Google’s deal with Xcel Energy. It’s intended to allow Google to pay a premium to specify the types of power it wants deployed while also encouraging utilities to incorporate such technologies into their long-range planning. Previous instruments like power purchase agreements were often treated by utilities as one-offs.
Google also said it is introducing a $10 million Energy Impact Fund intended to reduce utility bills, including by insulating homes. It sounds a lot like energy efficiency programs run by utilities, just with Google’s name on it. Whether $10 million is enough to assuage regular people’s concerns about rising electricity prices remains to be seen.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
This is the second “bring your own power” package that Google has touted, though it’s unlikely to be its last. In many ways, it’s not that different from the way the company has operated in the past. Sure, the tariff is relatively new, but Google has been investing in or developing new generating capacity ever since it vowed seven years ago to use 100% carbon free power.
The difference is that those projects tended to be announced on their own timelines. Now, we’re seeing the inverse — power projects that are in the works get announced along with the new data center. Smart marketing or something more? We’ll know in a few years.
Tech
BuzzFeed debuts AI slop apps in bid for new revenue
BuzzFeed, the U.S.-based media company known best for its quizzes, listicles, and, for a time, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism division, is reinventing itself for the AI era. At least, that’s the pitch.
At the SXSW conference in Austin, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti introduced the company’s next media foray: a spin-off called Branch Office, which will explore artificial intelligence in consumer-facing apps designed for creativity and connection.
The new company is an extension of the experiments BuzzFeed has run for years using AI technology, Peretti explained, in a halting presentation that began with slideshow glitches, before moving on to app demos met with silence or a polite tittering.
“We’ve been working on this secretly for over a year, and we’ve learned a lot from the BuzzFeed platform about what is coming with new kinds of AI formats,” Peretti said. “Using AI is the way of connecting people, building community around these pillars of culture, and taste, and community.”
Bill Shouldis, a director of product at BuzzFeed and the founder of Branch Office, presented two of the company’s new apps: BF Island and Conjure.
The first product, BF Island, is a group chat platform offering features for changing and editing photos using AI. This is not exactly groundbreaking tech in and of itself, but that’s not the point.
The key feature here is not the AI toolset but the in-app library of online trends and memes, created by an editorial team, which could inspire users to create AI photos referencing blink-and-you-miss-it trends like the McDonald’s CEO taste-testing a burger or the “frame-mogging” drama. (If you don’t know what these are, you’re probably not the “very online” audience that’s being targeted.)
The other app, Conjure, is similar to BeReal — the once-a-day temporary photo app — except that it instead appears to guide users to take daily photos of things besides themselves. (As a reminder, BeReal didn’t stick, ultimately exiting to Voodoo after losing traction.) In the demo, for instance, the photo prompt was “What lies between the trees and the moon?,” leading the users to snap a photo of the night sky. A series of spooky images flashed on the screen, followed by a whispered, “What will you conjure?”
We don’t get it, and clearly the audience didn’t either. After the demo, a lone cough could be heard among the silence, followed by uncomfortable laughter.
Shouldis then noted that AI is involved in Conjure, too, as the app has an “AI spirit for a CEO.” (Again, what?)
Peretti also introduced Quiz Party, a social app that lets you take BuzzFeed quizzes with friends and share your results.
BuzzFeed’s underwhelming presentation comes only days after the media company shared that it has “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as a business and was engaging in strategic conversations focused on fixing its liquidity challenges. The company, which had a net loss of $57.3 million last year, said it would focus this year on its Studio IP and new AI apps, like these.
But even the tech-forward audience at SXSW was not convinced.
As one person pointed out during the Q&A session after the presentation, BeReal had struggled to get people to come back after the novelty wore off. What would an app like Conjure do to combat the same sort of retention problem?
Shouldis said that the app would evolve “and have different types of things happening and not just be exactly what it is today.” He referenced the potential to integrate things like video, audio, and prototyping with Claude Code to build community.
The premise behind the new apps is not unreasonable: AI can lead to faster software development, which makes it possible for companies to more quickly iterate and keep people engaged.
“In a way, software is the new content,” Peretti noted.
Of course, before you can iterate, you have to attract users. With its new apps, BuzzFeed seems to have thought more about what AI can do than what people want to do with AI, which is not a recipe for success.
Raptors feeling things start to click as key road trip begins at Bulls
Fast-rising Hawks go for 11th straight win vs. Mavericks
