Organisation · company · DE

Aleph Alpha

Sovereign, enterprise-focused European LLMs; pivoted in 2024 from training its own frontier models to a platform integrating third-party ones.

3 entries · September 2026 – October 2026

Aleph Alpha is a German AI company founded in 2019 by Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach in Heidelberg, long treated as Europe's best hope for a sovereign frontier lab and backed by the retail group Schwarz, SAP and Bosch. Having started late and lacking the capital of its US rivals, it announced in 2024 that it would stop trying to train its own frontier models and instead sell an enterprise platform — with an emphasis on transparency and European data sovereignty — that integrates third-party models for businesses and governments. In April 2026 the Canadian lab Cohere agreed to acquire it in a deal the companies valued at around $20bn combined, described as one of the most significant European sovereign-AI transactions to date.

Category
Frontier & foundation-model labs
Founded
2019
HQ
Heidelberg, DE
Funding
$500m Series B (2023), backed by Schwarz Group, SAP and Bosch
Key people
Jonas Andrulis, Reto Spörri, Ilhan Scheer

Appears alongside

Featured in threads

Tracks

  • Money & business 2
  • Labs & people 2
  • Models & capabilities 1
  • Open weights & ecosystem 1

  1. Cohere announces first close of a Series E of up to C$7bn and a C$4bn Canada pledge

    Schwarz Group led a round at a C$35.7bn valuation with the Government of Canada as a new investor; the amount raised so far was not disclosed. Cohere reported 165% annual recurring revenue growth.

    Cohere, NVIDIAMoney & business · Labs & people

  2. Aleph Alpha releases Kolibri, an open-weight German-English model

    A 78bn-parameter mixture-of-experts model (3.5bn active) trained with roughly 23% German text, released on German Unity Day while its Cohere merger awaits approval.

    Models & capabilities · Open weights & ecosystem

  3. Cohere and Aleph Alpha agree to merge

    The deal, valued at roughly $20bn, gives Cohere shareholders about 90% of the combined firm and Aleph Alpha's shareholders about 10%.

    CohereMoney & business · Labs & people