Aleph Alpha
Category: Foundation Models / LLMs
German sovereign-AI company building specialized English-German large language models, including the open-weight Kolibri MoE model, for governments and regulated industries. Aleph Alpha was founded in 2019. The company is led by Ilhan Scheer. Based in Heidelberg, Germany. Team size: 101-500. Total funding raised: $533M. Latest round: Series B. Key investors include Schwarz Group, Dieter Schwarz Foundation, Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (IPAI), Bosch Ventures, SAP, Hubert Burda Media, Christ&Company Consulting, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Earlybird.
- Founded
- 2019
- Headquarters
- Heidelberg, Germany
- Team size
- 101-500
- Total funding
- $533M
Value proposition
Specialized sovereign LLMs, an AI platform and agentic solutions that organizations can run on-premises with full control over data, weights and deployment, aligned with European compliance and sovereignty requirements.
Products and solutions
Kolibri: open-weight English-German Mixture-of-Experts LLM with 78.1B total and 3.46B active parameters, up to 1M-token context, tool calling and four reasoning settings, released under Apache 2.0 in Oct 2026. Kolibri Origin. Earlier Luminous LLM family. Sovereign AI platform for building, scaling and optimizing AI solutions. Agentic AI solutions. Forward-deployed expert services. Model Factory training pipeline. Kolibri vLLM plugin.
Unique value
Fully European-controlled AI stack: data curation, training, evaluation, weights and deployment are all controlled in Germany/EU. The models are strongly optimized for German and include grounding/abstention training (Merlin-Arthur) for verifiable outputs.
Target customer
Government agencies, public administration and highly regulated or mission-critical enterprises (automotive, semiconductors, industrial technology, aerospace).
Industries served
Public sector / government, automotive, semiconductors, industrial technology, aerospace, regulated enterprises
Technology advantage
In-house pre-training at scale: Kolibri was trained on 768 NVIDIA B200 GPUs for about 24T tokens in Germany and Finland. The MoE design uses 384 experts with 6 active and hybrid sliding-window attention to cut inference costs. The bilingual 128K-entry tokenizer preserves German compounds. The Merlin-Arthur grounding method teaches abstention when evidence is missing. The company also offers on-prem and air-gapped deployment and has long-standing public-sector relationships.
How they differentiate
Compared with Mistral's general-purpose frontier and multimodal focus, Aleph Alpha concentrates on specialized German-English models with sector-specific evaluation suites, grounding and abstention, and deep sovereign on-prem deployments for public administration and German industry.
Main competitors
Mistral AI, LightOn, Cohere (merger partner)
Key partnerships
Cohere (definitive business combination agreement, Sep 2026), Schwarz Group / Schwarz Digits (sovereign AI on STACKIT cloud), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (non-exclusive partnership, HPE ML Development System), SAP (non-exclusive partnership), TU Darmstadt, University of Duisburg-Essen, EleutherAI, Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (IPAI)
Notable customers
City of Heidelberg (Lumi citizen information system), an unnamed government agency (80,000 users), an unnamed global chip manufacturer, an unnamed automotive technology supplier
Major milestones
2019: founded in Heidelberg by Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach. 2020/21: €5.3M seed. Jul 2021: €23M Series A led by Earlybird. 2021-22: multimodal Luminous models and MAGMA. Nov 2023: '$500M' Series B. Oct 2025: Jonas Andrulis steps down as CEO after a strategic realignment. Feb 2026: Ilhan Scheer appointed Co-CEO. Apr 2026: planned combination with Cohere announced. Sep 16, 2026: definitive business combination agreement with Cohere signed, pending regulatory approval. Sep 28, 2026: Reto Spörri leaves and Scheer becomes sole CEO. Oct 3, 2026: open-weight Kolibri released on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0.
Growth metrics
About 200 employees across four German locations: Heidelberg, Berlin, Bayreuth and Munich. Trade press reported that only about €110M of the 2023 '$500M' round was genuine equity, with about €300M in research funding for the Aleph Alpha Research subsidiary and €60M in order commitments. 2023 revenue was under €1M with an €18.9M loss. Customer case claims: a government AI assistant rolled out to 80,000 users, 90% search-time reduction at a chip manufacturer, and 40% time savings on RFQ processing at an automotive supplier.
Market positioning
Germany's flagship sovereign-AI provider for government and regulated industries. It is being combined with Cohere into a transatlantic sovereign AI company dual-headquartered in Berlin and Toronto, with Heidelberg retained as a research center.
Geographic focus
Germany / DACH and the European Union; transatlantic (Canada) following the Cohere combination
Patents and IP
Open-weight Kolibri model on Hugging Face (Apache 2.0). Published research includes MAGMA (multimodal), M-VADER and MultiFusion (NeurIPS 2023), and the Merlin-Arthur grounding method. Specific patents are not verified.
About Ilhan Scheer
Founder of fable+ (data analytics and transformation firm, acquired by Accenture); Ex-Accenture Managing Director overseeing a global portfolio of enterprise transformation products; Harvard Business School. Co-author of Decision Intelligence (Wiley). Appointed Co-CEO of Aleph Alpha in Feb 2026 and sole CEO and Managing Director in Sep 2026.
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Official website: https://aleph-alpha.com