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 ...)