TRO | Mistral Secures Multi-Billion Dollar AI Infrastructure Deal With Microsoft

Plus, Gemini Nears 1 Billion Monthly Users and OpenAI Launches AI Enterprise Agent Platform 'Presence'

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Meliora Company
July 27, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

 Subscribe | 27th July, 2026

In this fast-moving Vertical AI economy, headlines are everywhere but optimism is rare.

Here’s our take on 3 stories that will help you be relentlessly optimistic about the future.

1. Mistral Secures Multibillion-Dollar Deal With Microsoft To Build European AI Infrastructure

Microsoft has agreed to spend billions of dollars on Mistral's computing infrastructure in Europe, expanding distribution of the French AI start-up's technology through Microsoft's cloud and software ecosystem. Azure customers will be able to develop software using Mistral's data centres in France, giving regulated industries an alternative to US-controlled infrastructure. Mistral's Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 models have been added to Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio. Mistral is separately in talks to raise around US$3.4 billion at a US$22 billion valuation.

Here’s why this matters: The deal has divided opinion in France from the moment it was announced. Mistral's CEO framed it as closing Europe's infrastructure gap. A leading French presidential candidate called it the exact opposite of sovereign AI, arguing Mistral is making French data centres available for Microsoft to train its own models. Both readings contain truth. For the broader European AI sovereignty movement, the question is whether building on American platforms constitutes independence or a more sophisticated form of dependency. That tension will define European AI policy for years.

2. Gemini Nears 1 Billion Monthly Users

Google reported during its Q2 2026 earnings call that Gemini now has over 950 million monthly users, having tripled year on year from 300 million in July 2025 and up from 750 million in February. Gemini's AI Mode for Search crossed 1 billion users in the same quarter. According to Sensor Tower's State of AI report for H1 2026, ChatGPT's share of the AI assistant market fell below 50% for the first time, with Gemini's share rising to 27.7%. A billion monthly Gemini users now looks like a matter of weeks, not months.

Here’s why this matters: When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Google was widely described as caught flat-footed. Three and a half years later, Gemini is closing in on a billion monthly users and has taken more than a quarter of the AI assistant market. Google's distribution advantage across Search, Android, Gmail, YouTube, and Chrome has proven to be exactly the moat that sceptics underestimated. For the TMT industry, the Sensor Tower finding is the most significant number in this story: a market where no single AI assistant holds majority share is a fundamentally different competitive landscape to the one that existed six months ago. The next phase is retention, not acquisition.

3. OpenAI Launches Presence, An Enterprise AI Agent Platform

OpenAI has launched Presence, an enterprise platform for deploying AI voice and chat agents across customer support, outbound sales, and internal workflows. Each deployment is configured with company-specific policies, guardrails, and escalation rules, with Codex continuously proposing improvements as customer behaviour and business conditions change. OpenAI's own English-language phone support channel, running on Presence, now resolves 75% of inbound issues without human assistance and reduced human handoffs by 15 percentage points in 10 days. Enterprise partners include BBVA, SoftBank, and IAG, which is exploring Presence for customer support during severe weather events in Australia.

Here’s why this matters: OpenAI has spent three years winning the consumer market with ChatGPT. Presence is its most deliberate push yet into the layer where enterprise value is actually created: production-grade AI agents embedded into the workflows that run real businesses. The hard-won insight from years of enterprise deployment is that reliability in production matters more than capability in demos. For telecoms, media, and financial services in particular, a platform that handles open-ended customer requests, verifies callers, applies company policy, and escalates appropriately represents a meaningful shift in what AI can own end to end.

The Relentless Optimist Podcast Shortlisted For British Podcast Awards

Series 1 of Meliora’s The Relentless Optimist podcast has been shortlisted for the British Podcast Awards in the category of Business.

A huge thanks to our producers Gareth Evans and Anthony Zahra, and to our partners at 18Sixty, for bringing every story of Founders Courage, Level 3 Curiosity and Relentless Optimism to life.

Still Curious?

Our Pursuit Of Better

Three Harvard dropouts who built their chip company's first servers in a garage have closed a US$300 million Series C at a US$10.3 billion valuation, led by Sequoia with Andreessen Horowitz and SK Hynix participating. Etched has designed two new components from scratch to speed up AI inference at lower cost and has already booked US$1 billion in orders, with backers including Andrej Karpathy and Geoffrey Hinton.

Buzz, a group chat start-up founded by Jack Dorsey, has raised US$30 million in seed funding to build a workplace messaging platform designed for teams and their AI agents to work alongside each other. Unlike Slack or Teams, Buzz treats AI agents as first-class participants in conversations rather than add-ons, with each agent given its own persistent identity, memory, and communication style. Early access opens this autumn.

Imagi, a K-12 edtech start-up backed by Will.i.am, Brighteye Ventures, and Day One Capital, has raised US$4.5 million in seed funding to teach students how to build with AI rather than passively consume it. Through a partnership with Lovable, students get guided access to vibe coding tools in the classroom with full content screening in place. The platform has reached 700,000 students across 140 countries since launch.

The Pursuit of Better, Together

If this week’s newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a colleague. The best conversations often start with “You’ve got to read this”.