Heidelberg, Germany, 27 July, 2021, AI Research, Development and Deployment startupAleph Alpha raises €23 million in Series A funding. LEA Partners as the first institutional Investor in the company welcomes Earlybird VC, Lakestar and UVC Partners as new investors on board. Together with the seed funding of €5.3 million in November 2020, the total investment grows to €28.3 million. With the renewed and newly gained support of Europe’s leading deep tech investors and a record capital stock, Aleph Alpha is enabled to further accelerate the independent development of cutting-edge AI systems and continue to grow its team of world-class AI researchers, engineers and delivery professionals.
European AI powerhouse
Headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, Aleph Alpha was founded in 2019 by AI-serial entrepreneur Jonas Andrulis and his co-founder Samuel Weinbach. The stellar team of researchers combines AI veterans, serial entrepreneurs, and a new generation of AI engineers coming from CERN, Apple, DARPA, and other renowned organizations working together in developing and operationalizing large AI systems towards generalizable AI.
Aleph Alpha offers GPT-3-like text models as well as vision and strategy AI models via an API. This will enable public and private sector partners to modernize existing and develop new, innovative business models in data-based value creation. Aleph Alphas community-driven and interdisciplinary approach assures that current and future tectonic shifts in the global AI landscape are aligned with European values and ethical standards. Aleph Alpha and its partner network create a strong and sovereign European innovation powerhouse supporting fairer access to modern AI research – aimed at counteracting the ongoing 'de-democratization', monopolization, and loss of control and transparency.
Jonas Andrulis, CEO and founder of Aleph Alpha:
“Aleph Alpha’s mission is to enable the accessibility, usability and integration of large, European multilanguage and multimodal AI models following the likes of GPT-3 and DALL-E, driving innovation for the explainability, alignment and integration. 4The funds significantly accelerate the process of bringing the latest generation of AI technology into application and secure the digital sovereignty for public and private sector partners in Europe and beyond''.
Safeguarding European AI sovereignty
From model training to inference (application), Aleph Alpha safeguards personal and organizational sovereignty over data and gives control over normative value alignment back to the developer. The compute intensive training for these GPT-3-like AI models will be enabled through the buildup of a sovereign, EU-based compute infrastructure. This makes Aleph Alpha an indispensable success factor for the digitization of Europe’s private and public sectors.
Nils Seele, Principal at LEA Partners:
“When we first met Jonas and the team it was immediately clear that we share a common vision towards Artificial General Intelligence. For LEA as one of the first backers, it is great to see what stellar setting came together in the recent months, supporting the Aleph Alpha team in building European Sovereignty in AGI”,.
New age of human-machine interaction
Aleph Alpha’s generalizable AI models significantly augment and improve human capabilities in dealing with any sort of data. The technology is able to understand and create complex texts based on minimal human input, acting as a virtual assistant in a new generation of human-machine interaction. Such deep contextual understanding has been previously attributed only to human experts. These new functionalities will transform human interaction with information by structuring knowledge, responding to complex tasks, or transforming, summarizing, and structuring highly specialized language into easily understood everyday speech.