In 2019, the foundation of Aleph Alfa envisaged two core values, innovation and sovereignty, that became the nerve center to its mission. It took the efforts of Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach to quit their cushy tech jobs to initiate the launch of Aleph Alpha in Heidelberg, Germany.
The astute tech inputs of Andrulis, an Apple R&D Manager and serial entrepreneur, coupled with organization value addition brought to the table by Deloitte AI expert Weinbach, gave Aleph Alfa a promising start. The vision and mission at the company was research and building foundational technology for an era of strong Artificial Intelligence.
The last six years have seen Aleph Alfa’s strong growth, with many milestones achieved. In January this year, Aleph Alfa made a major breakthrough in the GenAI ecosystem. A new LLM architecture from the company eliminated so-called tokenizers, which break up text and code for AI training into smaller tokens.
Creating Sovereign Systems
The achievement of the level to eliminate tokenizers would have been unimaginable in 2021, when Aleph Alpha secured €5.3 million seed funding to build Europe-based generative AI based technology. The subsequent Series A funding round of €23 million came as a shot in the arm for Aleph Alfa.
The sector-specific involvement of Aleph Alfa is quite diversified. It has a presence in different verticals ranging from the public sector to its offerings for the industrials.
Having earned the distinction of being “Europe’s answer to OpenAI”, Aleph Alfa has been working closely with the government and administrations.
“At Aleph Alpha, we co-create sovereign systems that solve real problems. Our AI Frontier team works directly with enterprises and governments to build AI use cases that integrate deeply, scale sustainably, and deliver measurable value. Not someday. But now.,” says a company statement.
Co-CEO Jonas Andrulis, who is also serving as chairman of the board, sums it up, “The future of AI won’t be won by the biggest model. It’ll be won by the system best tailored to the right problem.”
With a major technological thrust to the manufacturing sector, right from the shopfloor to the research and development division, Aleph Alfa has been offering AI-driven automation for industrials.
World’s First Multimodal, Multilanguage LLM
The first major AI model launch by Aleph Alfa in 2022 paved the way for Luminous, the world’s first multimodal and multilanguage large language model. In terms of its value addition to the financial services industry, Aleph Alfa’s sovereign AI for banking and insurance is driven by innovation.
“Quick fixes and hastily integrated tools often fail to deliver lasting impact, especially when applied in siloed processes without strategic alignment,” reads a company blog.
“Our AI Frontier team has seen this firsthand. Chatbots may be the most familiar face of AI, but true transformation in enterprises and government runs far deeper.”
Three years after it was founded, 2022 witnessed the opening of apha ONE, the fastest European commercial AI Data Center. Located in Bavaria and equipped with 512 NVIDIA A100 GPUs, Alpha offers 7.625 petaflops of computational power.
Impressive Partnership Lineup
Aleph Alfa has a strong lineup of business partners in the cross-industry as well as the public sector. Its association with Materna Group has been remarkable, with a focus on implementation of innovative and sustainable IT and digitalization projects for customers in the private and public sectors.
There is an interesting perspective behind the name Aleph Alpha. Aleph (or alef or alif) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, and North Arabian. It also appears as South Arabian and Ge'ez. As the first letter of the alphabet, Alpha as a Greek numeral came to represent the number 1. Therefore, Alpha, both as a symbol and term, is used to refer to the "first", or "primary", or "principal" (most significant) occurrence or status of a thing. Striking a chord with “first”, the meaning of its name, Aleph Alfa has many firsts to its credit.
Besides an impressive list of partners, which includes PWC, HewlettPackard, Sakackit, Capgemini, Deloitte, Roland Berger, and Soprasteria, Alpha Aleph firmly believes in research that brings about change in the real world and leads to human empowerment.
Fulfilling Needs of Performance, Scalability
At Alef Alpha, AI is intertwined into characteristics that define the qualities which drive its day-to-day operations. The AI built for production environments strikes a balance to fulfill the needs of performance, scalability, and robustness.
Besides, Alef Alpha’s advance foundation model architectures combine with integration patterns beyond chatbots. Scale is no pre-requisite for Aleph Alfa, as it makes AI accessible for all kinds of organizations, even in the data-scarce contexts such as low-resource languages, multimodality, and specialized enterprise knowledge.
What drives transparency at Alef Alpha is its firm belief that a customer should be fully aware of how its technology works. Be it the study papers or blog posts, the reach out speaks for itself.
The source-available approach of Alef Alpha’s stack is also a step towards creating sovereignty of its customers.
Human Intervention
In regulated sectors, the complex nature of GenAI makes it difficult for humans to take responsibility. Such kind of methods are developed so that there is inspecting, understanding, and validating responses, putting the human at the center. The one size fits it all approach is rejected at Aleph Alpha, which firmly believes in offering customized and interactive AI outputs.
In terms of the solutions it offers, Aleph Alfa is involved in DORA Contract Compliance, as a part of which it provides AI support for digital risk compliance. Another foray is the GovTech AI Assistant, which specializes in AI assistance for the public sector. The Pharia Engineering brings forth AI enhancing engineering and production efficiency.
With Pharia, Aleph Alpha offers an end-to-end stack, making integration, scaling, and maintenance simple and straightforward. On top of that, one can access unique AI innovations that add capabilities where standard offerings fall short.
Generative AI Chatbot
In October 2022, Aleph Alpha launched LUMI, the world’s first generative AI chatbot for the public sector. Another novel innovation included introduction of world’s first explainability function for LLMs. A $500 million Series B funding round in November 2023 boosted Aleph Alpha and launch of creanc.ai, a generative AI solution for compliance. The AI major ended 2024 on a strong note with the launch of TFree, a new architecture that slows LLMs to learn low-resource languages, out-of-distribution knowledge, and rare knowledge.
Aleph Alpha takes an end-to-end, mission-focused approach to GenAI research, training foundation models, enhancing the technical possibilities with generative AI, and developing systems that reflect the values it works to ingrain.
“We are committed to responsible and open research. We raise the bar on openness, responsibly sharing all innovations without obfuscation,” says a company statement.
In July this year, Aleph Alpha signed EU’s code of practice for AI models and expects to continue its growth story during the next year. “We are actively aligning our practices with upcoming regulatory frameworks, including the EU AI Act, and have obtained ISO 27001 certification as a testament to our exceptional commitment to information security and regulatory compliance,” says Aleph Alfa in a statement.
An intriguing achievement of the Aleph Alpha innovation is that, in the process to eliminate tokenizers, AMD and Schwarz Digits/StackIT of Lidl owner Schwarz Group are also on board in Aleph Alpha’s restructuring of the generally accepted GenAI architecture.
“This collaboration brings more than AI – it delivers resiliency and innovation to the European AI ecosystem,” says Keith Strier, SVP, Global AI Markets, AMD. “We are thrilled to collaborate with Aleph Alpha and Schwarz Digits to boost Europe’s native AI capabilities and create a new AI trifecta for governments: a hyper-transparent GenAI platform, developed and trained within Europe, delivering exceptional efficiency on our AMD AI infrastructure.”
Jonas Andrulis, Founder & Co-CEO, Aleph Alpha
