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