Aleph Alpha, a Heidelberg-based startup focused on open source large language models (LLM), has raised €486 million in its Series B financing round. Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck called the startup an “incredible success story.” Indeed, this was one of Europe’s largest AI rounds ever – Mistral AI, the French startup which also relies on open source for its model made a splash this June when it raised €105 million in its seed funding round. 

Aleph Alpha’s funding round was led by Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (Ipai), Bosch Ventures and companies operating under the Schwarz Group umbrella (Lidl, Kaufland). Other new investors include Christ&Company Consulting, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and SAP, as well as Burda Principal Investments. Existing institutional investors have also participated in the round.

The company plans to invest the raised funds in research on foundation models, advanced product capabilities – especially for business-critical environments – in addition to exploring commercialisation with selected key partners. Moreover, the consortium partners have agreed to guarantee the purchase of licence packages.

In pursuit of its goals of collaboration, sovereignty, and innovation, Aleph Alpha publishes its model’s source code on GitHub. The company is lauded as being a European answer to the American giants in the gen AI space, particularly OpenAI and its ChatGPT bot.