Operato AI launches an AI-visibility platform: see what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity say about your brand
Israeli startup Operato AI on October 9 launched a self-service platform that measures how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity answer the questions buyers ask — showing where a brand ranks in those answers, which competitors get recommended instead, and what to fix first.
Ecosia’s decision to drop French AI provider Mistral is not a pivot towards Chinese technology, but a shift towards open, affordable, energy-efficient AI models, founder and CEO Christian Kroll said in an exclusive conversation with EU-Startups. “We’ll probably be using Melious.ai in future. Unlike Mistral, this is a European company that offers high-quality, affordable AI inference powered by green electricity,” Kroll said.
The clarification follows a POLITICO report on October 6 that Ecosia was replacing Mistral with open models, including Alibaba’s Qwen, Z.ai’s GLM and Moonshot AI’s Kimi — a story that raised eyebrows in European policy circles. The partnership was a short one: Ecosia had only replaced OpenAI with Mistral back in May.
Why the partnership broke down
Kroll told POLITICO he was “disappointed with the quality of Mistral,” calling the French lab “a year behind” the competition, and cited recurring technical problems including overloaded servers — Ecosia, he said, was simply too large a customer for Mistral to serve. The switch to open models has reportedly cut Ecosia’s AI costs roughly in half while improving performance.
In the EU-Startups interview, Kroll widened the critique to sovereignty: Mistral’s reliance on foreign investors, particularly from the United States, undermines its European independence, he argued. The point lands awkwardly against Mistral’s fundraising streak — a €3 billion Series D in September 2026 led by Samsung at a valuation above €21 billion, with US backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures on the cap table. Two days after the POLITICO story broke, Mistral unveiled Large 4, its new frontier model, with chief scientist Guillaume Lample offering Ecosia early access to it.
The China question
Kroll stressed that the company’s focus is on open models, not their country of origin — they offer lower costs, greater flexibility and reduced energy consumption, all aligned with Ecosia’s environmental mission. Addressing concerns about political censorship in Chinese AI models, he said Ecosia can route sensitive subjects, such as questions about Taiwan, to alternative models, and is working to eliminate political biases from its AI-generated answers.
The plumbing matters as much as the weights. The models are served through Melious, a German platform running on European infrastructure powered by low-carbon energy — which lets Ecosia use internationally developed models while keeping its infrastructure and data processing inside Europe.
Why it matters
Ecosia is no marginal customer. The Berlin search engine donates 100% of its advertising profits to climate action and its services are used by institutions including Germany’s federal environment ministry and the UK’s National Health Service. Since 2018 it has operated under a steward-ownership structure that prevents the company from being sold or distributing profits to shareholders.
For Kroll, the switch is a thesis about European technology: rather than depending on individual AI developers to train frontier models on the continent, European companies can build competitive, independent services on open models running on European infrastructure. For Mistral, it reads as a loss of trust from one of Europe’s highest-profile AI customers — one week after its biggest funding round, and on the same week it unveiled its most ambitious model yet.