Aleph Alpha

History

2023: Raising $500 million in investments

On November 6, 2023, German artificial intelligence startup Aleph Alpha announced a Series B funding round, during which $500 million was raised for development. Funds, among others, were provided by Bosch, SAP and HPE.

The firm, Aleph Alpha, was founded in 2019 with the goal of "researching and creating foundational technologies for the AI era." The startup is developing large language models (LLMs) with tens of billions of parameters. Aleph Alpha offers generative AI solutions to enterprise customers and government agencies. The startup emphasizes the concept of "data sovereignty" - this is a model under which data stored in a particular country is subject to the laws of that country. The concept has received support from a number of European politicians and lawmakers.

Aleph Alpha says its solutions provide an opportunity to create and apply AI products in an independent environment. Company models can communicate in German, French, Spanish, Italian and English. Data for LLM training includes an extensive repository of multilingual public documents published by the European Parliament.

The Series B round was led by the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Park (Ipai), Bosch Ventures Foundation and Schwarz Group. Other participants, in addition to the already mentioned SAP and NRE, included the Berlin company Christ & Company Consulting and Burda Principal Investments. Aleph Alpha plans to use the funds raised to develop basic AI models, expand the capabilities of its products and commercialize solutions. The funding is noted to "strengthen Aleph Alpha's position as the leading provider of independent generative AI applications in Europe^[1]

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