Aleph Alpha

Aleph Alpha GmbH is registered at Speyerer Straße 14, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany (Amtsgericht Mannheim HRB 732804, VAT DE322477849, founded 27 February 2019). Additional offices are at Wallstraße 16 Berlin, Weiherstraße 26 Bayreuth and Einsteinstraße 174 Munich. Current Geschäftsführer per the imprint at https://aleph-alpha.com/en/imprint/: Reto Spörri (registered 3 November 2025) and Ilhan Scheer (registered 10 April 2026). Founder Jonas Andrulis was terminated as Geschäftsführer on 15 January 2026 per the Handelsregister extract; founder Samuel Weinbach's current role is not disclosed on the public imprint as of May 2026. Prokuristen are Amit Datta, Benjamin Oppl, Carsten Johann Dirks and Ramin Shirazi. Stammkapital is EUR 57,977 as of 15 July 2025.

On 24 April 2026 Cohere (Toronto / Canada) announced an all-stock acquisition of Aleph Alpha: Cohere shareholders receive about 90% of the combined company and Aleph Alpha shareholders about 10%; the combined entity is valued at roughly 20 billion USD and would be headquartered in both Toronto and Germany, with Schwarz Group investing 600 million USD into Cohere's Series E round (expected to close later in 2026). The deal is subject to regulatory conditions being met and was NOT closed at the time of this profile (2026-05-20). Until close, Aleph Alpha's CLOUD Act exposure remains partial-via-subprocessors (German GmbH contracting + STACKIT sovereign hosting + US-controlled corporate-side subprocessors); after close, with Cohere as a Canadian parent that has US offices and a US-dominated investor base (NVIDIA, Salesforce, Cisco, Oracle, AMD), the classification would likely shift to partial-via-subsidiaries -- to be re-verified once the merger closes.

PhariaAI-as-a-Service runs on STACKIT, the Schwarz Digits sovereign cloud, in German data centres certified to BSI C5 (announcement 26 May 2025 at the Schwarz Group TECH conference; Bernd Wagner, STACKIT CEO: "With PhariaAI on STACKIT, organizations can implement their individual AI strategies completely confidently on German infrastructure"). On-prem hybrid deployment is supported via PhariaOS + Helm chart distribution. Training happens in the company-operated alpha ONE datacenter at the GovTech Campus Berlin, including Cerebras CS-3 wafer-scale supercomputers used for BWI (German Armed Forces digital arm) workloads. The corporate marketing website is fronted by Cloudflare and Fastly with the origin on Hetzner Nürnberg, but uses US subprocessors (Namecheap DNS + domain registrar, Google Analytics, Mailchimp newsletter, Ashby applicant tracking, Google Workspace email) -- the privacy policy at https://aleph-alpha.com/datenschutz/ enumerates these for the corporate-side data; product-data subprocessor lists for PhariaAI are typically behind the sales contract.

Pharia-1-LLM-7B-control on Hugging Face (Aleph-Alpha/Pharia-1-LLM-7B-control, 7,041,544,704 parameters, trained on 7.7T tokens, EN/DE/FR/ES/IT/PT/NL) ships under the Open Aleph License v1. The license is published at https://github.com/Aleph-Alpha/.github/blob/main/oal.pdf and restricts use to non-commercial research and education only; it is NOT an OSI-approved open-source license. Compliance language on the model card references GDPR, the EU Text-and-Data-Mining Directive 2019/790, and monitoring of the EU AI Act 2024/1689. Aleph Alpha's data-processing language on the card: "No prompt data is stored when using our systems... We do not log user inputs to the models. We do not train on user data." Two variants are published: -control and -control-aligned.

Schwarz Digits (the cloud and tech arm of Schwarz Gruppe, which also operates Lidl and Kaufland) participated in the Series B announced November 2023 alongside Bosch Ventures, SAP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Burda and the Innovation Park AI Heilbronn (IPAI). Per Wirtschaftswoche reporting, Schwarz held "just under 14 percent" of Aleph Alpha in mid-January 2026 before announcing on 28 January 2026 its intent to acquire the ~6% stake held by Bosch Ventures; the combined position would bring Schwarz to roughly 20%. Christian Müller, Co-CEO of Schwarz Digits: "Every organization has highly specialized expertise in the form of data that it should never relinquish." The Schwarz-Bosch transaction is described as "subject to approval by the authorities". Burda GmbH is also listed as a Gesellschafter per the Handelsregister entry dated 29 December 2025. Two German GmbHs were absorbed into Aleph Alpha during 2025: thingsTHINKING GmbH (merger 26 Sep 2025) and Alpha Layer GTS GmbH (30 May 2025).