Key facts

Founded
2019
HQ
Heidelberg, Germany
Employees
About 200
Website
Funding stage
Series B · US$500m+
LinkedIn
Further facts
  • Capital: Aleph Alpha raised more than US$500m in a Series B announced in November 2023, led by Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (Ipai), Bosch Ventures and the companies of Schwarz Group, with Christ&Company, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, SAP and Burda Principal Investments.
  • Timeline: Cohere signed an agreement on 16 September 2026 to acquire Aleph Alpha, subject to regulatory approvals; the deal had not closed by October 2026.
  • Products: Aleph Alpha released Kolibri, an open-weight German-English language model, on 3 October 2026.
  • Leadership: Founder Jonas Andrulis left the company in January 2026. Reto Spörri left in September 2026, and Ilhan Scheer continues as sole chief executive.
  • Ownership: Aleph Alpha GmbH is a private company registered in Mannheim under HRB 732804, with sites in Heidelberg, Berlin, Bayreuth and Munich.

Focus areas

Sovereign AI Large language models Foundation models Public sector Manufacturing On-premises deployment Agentic workflows

About

Aleph Alpha is a Heidelberg company founded in 2019 that researches and builds specialised large language models for public administration and regulated industry in Germany and Europe. Its Kolibri model, released in October 2026 with open weights, is trained to reason in German and English and runs on infrastructure customers control, from on-premises and air-gapped sites to sovereign cloud. Around 200 people work across Heidelberg, Berlin, Bayreuth and Munich. In September 2026 Cohere signed an agreement to acquire Aleph Alpha, subject to regulatory approvals; the deal had not closed by October 2026.

How they use AI

Kolibri is a mixture-of-experts model with 78 billion total parameters and around 3 billion active per token, a German-optimised tokenizer and native tool calling for agentic workflows and retrieval-augmented generation, where it is trained to abstain when supplied documents lack evidence. Training data was screened against a blocklist of more than 4.5 million URLs. Aleph Alpha's platform and forward-deployed teams build assistants on top of it, such as a government assistant serving 80,000 users and engineering search that cut a chipmaker's search time by 90%.

Products and services

  • Kolibri — Open-weight German-English specialised language model on Hugging Face, with tool calling, RAG and adjustable reasoning effort
  • Adaptive Platform — Model and application platform deployable on-premises, air-gapped or as sovereign SaaS
  • Workspace Essentials — Ready-made generative AI assistants for knowledge work in public and regulated organisations
  • Industrial Engineering Workbench — Engineering-requirements assistant built as an extension for Siemens Polarion
  • Forward-deployed services — Aleph Alpha engineers who co-build and run use cases with customer teams

Key people

  • Ilhan Scheer — Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director
  • Samuel Weinbach — Co-founder and Co-Chief Research Officer
  • Yasser Jadidi — Co-Chief Research Officer

Investors