Aleph Alpha

Founders and company background

Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach founded Aleph Alpha in 2019. Investor Burda Principal Investments identifies both founders and the company's European AI focus. The company develops language models and deployment software for organizations that need control over their AI systems.

Current leadership

On 28 September 2026, Aleph Alpha announced that Reto Spörri had left after fourteen months as co-CEO. Ilhan Scheer continued as CEO and became sole managing director. The current legal imprint also names Scheer as the company's representative.

Investors and the 2023 funding package

The November 2023 financing announcement named Ipai, Bosch Ventures and Schwarz Group as lead participants. Other investors included SAP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Burda Principal Investments. Its headline total above $500 million included applied research investment, joint business commitments and advance license purchases. That total should not be read as a simple equity-only round.

Proposed combination with Cohere

On 16 September 2026, the companies signed a definitive business combination agreement. They planned to operate globally as Cohere, with headquarters in Toronto and Berlin and a research center in Heidelberg. Scheer's proposed COO role and Weinbach's proposed research leadership role at Cohere were conditional on completion.

Aleph Alpha's 5 October Kolibri announcement said the transaction still required regulatory approval and that the company would remain independent until closing. The checked sources do not establish a later completion, so this profile does not describe the combination as completed.

Model and platform milestones

PhariaAI combines an assistant, development tools and deployment software around both Aleph Alpha and third-party models. The platform name is therefore broader than the Pharia 1 model family.

Kolibri became available on 3 October 2026. It introduced a German-and-English mixture-of-experts reasoning model with downloadable weights and a documented training process. The current company model pages center on this release.

Scope of these guides

Practical guidance. This catalog covers Kolibri, the major downloadable Pharia releases and selected tokenizer-free research checkpoints. It groups precision formats and framework conversions with their parent model. It does not treat old Luminous documentation, auxiliary classifiers or unpublished experiments as proof of a current public endpoint.