Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 1, 2026

Aleph Alpha

Aleph Alpha GmbH is a German artificial intelligence (AI) startup developing large language models (LLMs). It emphasizes transparency of the sources used to generate the results. The company caters to enterprises and governmental agencies only.

Last revised
Jun 1, 2026
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≈ 5 min
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Aleph Alpha GmbH
Company type
Private
IndustryArtificial intelligence
Founded2019 (2019)
Founders
  • Jonas Andrulis
  • Samuel Weinbach
HeadquartersHeidelberg, Germany
ProductsLuminous LLM
Number of employees
51-2001 (2024)
Websitealeph-alpha.com

Aleph Alpha GmbH is a German artificial intelligence (AI) startup developing large language models (LLMs). It emphasizes transparency of the sources used to generate the results.2 The company caters to enterprises and governmental agencies only.

History

Aleph Alpha was founded in 2019 by Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach.34 After securing €5.3 million in seed funding in 2020,5 Aleph Alpha raised an additional €23 million in a second round of financing in 2021, backed by several European venture capital firms.6 In 2021, Aleph Alpha offered multimodality,7 the ability to prompt their models with any combination of text and images.8 In 2022, the company developed the ability to create images based on multimodal input9 (NeurIPS 2023: Multifusion).10

In a financing round in November 2023, German companies Schwarz Gruppe and Dieter Schwarz Foundation, with the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (IPAI), participated as the co-lead investors along with Bosch,11 SAP, Hubert Burda Media, Christ&Company Consulting, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The round raised a total of $500 million.1213 The amount of a 500 million dollar financing round publicly communicated by Aleph Alpha appeared to be significantly higher than the funds actually raised.14 Research by the trade press subsequently revealed that only 110 million euros of the total volume was genuine equity financing. A further 300 million euros had flowed into research funding for the company subsidiary Aleph Alpha Research, as well as 60 million euros in the form of order commitments.15 Meanwhile, the internal sales target of 6 million US dollars for 2023 had not been achieved: According to the 2023 financial statements, the company had not even been able to show a turnover of one million euros, while the loss amounted to 18.9 million euros.16

In April 2026, Cohere and Aleph Alpha announced that they are in talks to merge and have Berlin's support for a potential deal.17 On April 24, Cohere and Aleph Alpha announced that a merger would go through in a deal which Cohere would acquire Aleph Alpha. Though the terms of the deal were not public, an anonymous individual told the New York Times that would make the combined companies worth $20 billion. The deal was made in a bid to challenge AI dominance from primarily the United States as well as China, with the New York Times noting that Cohere had struggled to keep up in attracting investment from US-based companies. Schwarz Gruppe stated the terms of the deal would also involve them investing $600 million in Cohere.18

Description

Aleph Alpha developed its own AI language model, Luminous, based on its own research and codebase with the architecture of generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) and self-supervised learning. Its method makes patterns learned by GPT models visible and controllable, addressing the "black box" problem of generative AI.1920 As a tool to build and train its foundation models, the HPE Machine Learning Development System is used.21

Customers include the citizen information system, Lumi, for the city of Heidelberg.22

For R&D, Aleph Alpha is working with the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Technical University of Darmstadt. It is also participating in open-source organizations such as EleutherAI.23 Both Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and SAP have entered non-exclusive partnerships with Aleph Alpha.24

See also

See also

References

References

  1. "Aleph Alpha News, Hiring, Layoffs, Competitors, CEO, Fundraising Insights". RivalSense. Retrieved 28 October 2024.
  2. Schreiner, Maximilian (5 June 2023). "AI startup Aleph Alpha shows off latest LLMs with a unique feature". The Decoder. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
  3. "L'histoire de réussite de Jonas Andrulis sous les projecteurs". Eulerpool Research Systems (in French). 13 November 2023. Retrieved 14 April 2024.
  4. "Chatbot-Konkurrenz aus Deutschland: Auf Wiedersehen, ChatGPT - und willkommen Aleph Alpha". finanzen.net (in German). 15 March 2023. Archived from the original on 18 May 2025. Retrieved 14 November 2025.
  5. Tucker, Charlotte (27 January 2021). "Heidelberg-based Aleph Alpha raises €5.3 million to lead "Made in Europe" AI development". EU-Startups. Retrieved 14 April 2024.
  6. Earlybird leads Aleph Alpha's 23 million EURO Serie A for the largest European AI models. press release, earlybird.com, 2021-07-27. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  7. online, heise (18 November 2021). "KI-Modell kann Bilder beschreiben: Aleph Alpha ist Vorreiter für multimodale KI". Developer (in German). Retrieved 14 April 2024.
  8. online, heise (16 March 2022). "GPT-3 überflügeln: Quellcode des KI-Modells MAGMA steht auf GitHub". Developer (in German). Retrieved 14 April 2024.
  9. online, heise (9 December 2022). "KI-Bildsynthese: M-VADER erstellt Bilder aus beliebigen Text- und Bildvorgaben". Developer (in German). Retrieved 14 April 2024.
  10. "Aleph Alpha Forschungen: NeurIPS Highlights – ainfach.ai" (in German). 8 December 2023. Retrieved 14 April 2024.
  11. Generative AI Investments Aleph Alpha, Anthropic and Cohere. SAP news, 2023-07-18. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  12. Aleph Alpha raises a total investment of more than half a billion US Dollars from a consortium of industry leaders and new investors. Press Release, aleph-alpha.com, 2023-11-06. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  13. Cantrill, Aggi; Bergen, Mark (6 November 2023). "German Giants Pour Over $500 Million Into AI Startup Aleph Alpha". Bloomberg. Archived from the original on 28 August 2025. Retrieved 14 November 2025.
  14. Thomas Knüwer (25 June 2024). "Das Märchen von der 500-Millionen-Finanzierungsrunde bei Aleph Alpha". indiskretion-ehrensache.de (in German). Retrieved 16 April 2025.
  15. Madita Lege (9 July 2024). "Aufgeblasene Finanzierung? Aleph Alpha nennt Details". gruenderszene.de (in German). Business Insider. Retrieved 16 April 2025.
  16. Hannah Schwär, Caspar Tobias Schlenk (9 July 2024). "Aleph Alphas aufgeblasene 500-Millionen-Finanzierung". Capital (in German). Retrieved 16 April 2025.
  17. "Canada's Cohere, Germany's Aleph Alpha in merger talks, Handelsblatt reports". CNA. Retrieved 10 April 2026.
  18. Satariano, Adam (24 April 2026). "A.I. Start-Ups From Canada and Germany Merge to Take On Silicon Valley". The New York Times. Retrieved 8 May 2026.
  19. Schreiner, Maximilian (5 June 2023). "AI startup Aleph Alpha shows off latest LLMs with a unique feature". THE DECODER. Retrieved 14 April 2024.
  20. "Handelsblatt". www.handelsblatt.com. Retrieved 14 April 2024.
  21. Hewlett Packard Enterprise accelerates AI journey from POC to production with new solution(s) for AI development and training at scale. Press Release, HPE, 2022-04-27. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  22. KI-Bürgerassistenz Lumi. heidelberg.de, 2023 (in German). Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  23. Accelerating Europe’s multilingual AI revolution. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, 2022. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  24. Matthias Hohensee: Wir verbünden uns mit den besten Unternehmen der Welt. In: WirtschaftsWoche, 2023-06-22 (in German). Retrieved 2023-11-11.
External links