Mistral, a French artificial intelligence company, has acquired Pimento, a Paris-based start-up that uses AI to generate advertisements. This marks Mistral’s third acquisition of the year, following the purchase of Koyeb in February and Emmi AI in May. The deal was first reported by the media outlet L'Informé, and Mistral later confirmed the acquisition to AFP, stating it involved "several million euros." However, the exact financial terms have not been officially disclosed by either company. Pimento was founded in October 2022 by Florent Facq, a former product director at Pass Culture, and Tomás Yany, who previously worked at Apple and Nabla. Initially, the start-up provided a tool to help creative teams visualize and structure their ideas before producing advertisements. Pimento’s software now transforms marketing briefs, brand guidelines, and campaign data into visual ads and short animations for social media. More than 180 brands currently use this platform. According to a source close to the transaction, Mistral was primarily interested in Pimento’s technical expertise rather than its commercial operations. Florent Facq, one of Pimento’s co-founders, announced on LinkedIn that his team will work on improving the user experience of Mistral’s conversational AI assistant, Vibe, formerly known as Le Chat. Pimento’s employees are expected to join Mistral’s product and engineering teams. Estimates of the acquisition price vary. L'Informé reported approximately 3.8 million euros, while the publication Sifted, which examined related documents, suggested a higher amount of 12.7 million euros in cash plus Mistral shares. The discrepancy may be due to whether shares are included in the valuation. Pimento had previously raised 3 million euros in 2023 from investors like Partech and Cygni Capital, as well as from individual backers such as Julien Chaumond of Hugging Face and Stanislas Polu of Dust. Mistral, on the other hand, recently secured 3 billion euros in funding, led by Samsung Electronics, which values the company at over 21 billion euros. The future of Pimento’s advertising platform and the data used by the brands that rely on it remains unclear. Neither Mistral nor Pimento has provided details on whether the tool will continue to operate or how the data will be handled moving forward.