Aleph Alpha: Germany's sovereign AI lesson

Bajío Ventures · October 2026 · Sovereign AI, 1 of 5

Aleph Alpha was founded in Heidelberg in 2019. Its founders were Jonas Andrulis, who came from Apple, and Samuel Weinbach. Its proposal was to build European, explainable language models on sovereign compute infrastructure in the European Union. For years it was presented as Germany’s answer to OpenAI. Its history is the best available case study of what works and what does not work in sovereign AI.

Timeline

Date	Event
2019	Founded in Heidelberg
Jul 2021	Series A of EUR 23 million
2022–2023	Luminous family: models of 13, 30 and 70 billion parameters
6 Nov 2023	Series B announced as “more than USD 500 million”
17 Apr 2024	Four-year framework contract with BWI, the IT provider of the German armed forces
Jul 2024	The press publishes the real composition of the round and the 2023 accounts
26 Aug 2024	Pharia-1-LLM (7 billion parameters) and the PhariaAI platform
5 Sep 2024	The founder announces the change of strategy
Jan 2026	About 50 jobs cut; the founder leaves his posts
28 Jan 2026	Schwarz Group announces the purchase of Bosch Ventures’ stake
24 Apr 2026	The combination with Cohere is announced
16 Sep 2026	Definitive agreement announced
3 Oct 2026	Kolibri-1, under the Apache 2.0 licence

The round that wasn’t

The Series B of November 2023 was led by the Ipai innovation park in Heilbronn, Bosch Ventures and the companies of Schwarz Group, the owner of Lidl. SAP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Burda and Christ&Company also joined.

In July 2024 the German press published what it was made of: EUR 110 million in equity, EUR 300 million in research funding and EUR 60 million in purchase commitments. The 2023 accounts showed revenue of EUR 945,000 and a loss of EUR 18.8 million.

The headline figure and the equity available to train models were not the same thing. The total, EUR 470 million, was more than four times the equity.

Having a European model is not a business model

In September 2024 Andrulis said it plainly to Bloomberg, as TechCrunch reported: “The world changed. Just having an European LLM is not sufficient as a business model. It doesn’t justify the investment.”

The company stopped competing on models and concentrated on PhariaAI, which it presented as an “operating system” for generative AI: the layer that lets a government or a company run any model inside its own infrastructure, with traceable answers.

Who bought

The anchor customer was the state:

• Armed forces. Framework contract with BWI in April 2024.
• Baden-Württemberg. The F13 assistant for the state administration, with Schwarz IT and STACKIT (July 2024).
• Federal Employment Agency. Up to EUR 19 million over four years (October 2024).

We found no energy-sector customer with a published name, and no presence of the company in Mexico or Latin America. In January 2026 Schwarz Group announced that it would take over Bosch Ventures’ stake, subject to approval: the focus on the public sector, retail and finance no longer matched the themes Bosch invests in. That same month, according to Handelsblatt, the company cut about 50 jobs and Andrulis left the management and the advisory board.

2026: Cohere

On 24 April 2026 the combination with Canada’s Cohere was announced in Berlin. According to TechCrunch, Schwarz Group contributes EUR 500 million in structured financing as lead investor in Cohere’s new round, and the combined value is about USD 20 billion according to Handelsblatt. Cohere’s announcement gives no figures. The press reports a split of close to 90% for Cohere’s shareholders and 10% for Aleph Alpha’s shareholders.

The definitive agreement was announced on 16 September 2026:

• The company will be called Cohere.
• It will have dual headquarters, in Berlin and Toronto. Heidelberg remains as a research center.
• Aidan Gomez continues as chief executive. Ilhan Scheer will be chief operating officer and Samuel Weinbach will be chief research officer.
• It will have more than 1,000 employees.
• Closing is expected later in 2026 and depends on regulatory approvals. As of 5 October we found no report that it has happened.

TechCrunch itself raises the question: will European organizations see an initiative with Canada as sovereign enough, and what happens if the company goes public and ends up in the hands of global shareholders?

Kolibri-1

On 3 October 2026 Aleph Alpha released Kolibri-1. The data from its model card:

Attribute	Kolibri-1
Parameters	78 billion in total; 3.46 billion active per token
Licence	Apache 2.0
Languages	German and English; German is about 23.9% of the corpus
Pre-training corpus	20 trillion tokens
Pre-training	768 Nvidia B200 GPUs for 21 days (511 hours; 392,000 GPU-hours)
Knowledge cutoff date	18 June 2026

It is the company’s first general-purpose language model with a permissive licence. The language models it had released before, Pharia-1 included, came out under the Open Aleph License, which only allows non-commercial use for research and education. The Kolibri-1 licence covers the weights and the configuration files, not the code or the training method.

Two readings. The first: the German “sovereign” model was trained on Nvidia chips. Layer two did not change. The second: pre-training took 392,000 GPU-hours. Coatlicue, the supercomputer that Mexico plans, will have 14,480 GPUs: at full load it adds up to that amount in a little more than one day (our own calculation; the chips are not necessarily equivalent). The compute for a model of this size is within reach of a mid-sized country. The hard part is everything else.

Three lessons for Mexico

1. The model is not the business. The founder said so in 2024. The value is in deploying, integrating and operating. For a country, that means investing in those who apply AI, not only in those who train it.
2. Sovereignty needs a patient owner. The owner that sustained Aleph Alpha was a retail group with its own cloud (STACKIT), not a venture capital fund. That logic is close to the logic of the German Mittelstand as a long-term owner.
3. Scale comes through alliances. The national champion ended up in a binational company. This is what Brookings calls managed interdependence, and it is more honest than promising self-sufficiency.

In this series: Guide: what sovereign AI is · 1. Aleph Alpha · 2. Mistral · 3. United States · 4. China · 5. Spanish-language models and Mexico

Sources: TechCrunch, Series A, Jul 2021 · Bosch, Series B, Nov 2023 · ComputerBase, composition of the round, Jul 2024 · Gründerszene via Yahoo Finanzen, 2023 accounts · TechCrunch, change of strategy, Sep 2024 · Maginative, PhariaAI, Aug 2024 · BWI, Apr 2024 · Computerwoche, F13, Jul 2024 · Handelsblatt, Federal Employment Agency, Oct 2024 · Handelsblatt, job cuts and founder’s exit, Jan 2026 · Schwarz Group, Jan 2026 · Stuttgarter Zeitung, Bosch’s exit · TechCrunch, Cohere, Apr 2026 · The Next Web, shareholding split · Cohere, definitive agreement, 16 Sep 2026 · Hugging Face, Kolibri-1 · Hugging Face, Pharia-1-LLM

Bajío Ventures — a Mexican energy-infrastructure investment group based in Guanajuato: capital, a data platform on the region’s industrial base, and a German industrial channel, with its own advisory presence in Berlin.