Aleph Alpha
German sovereign AI company offering enterprise models and the PhariaAI platform for government and corporate deployment.
📍 Germany 🇩🇪, Heidelberg
Product overview
Aleph Alpha builds sovereign AI models and enterprise deployment infrastructure from Heidelberg, Germany. Founded in 2019 by Jonas Andrulis (ex-Apple) and Samuel Weinbach, the company raised approximately €140 million in equity, with its largest backer being the Schwarz Group (parent of Lidl and Kaufland). The company originally developed the Luminous family of language models (13B, 30B, and 70B parameters) trained across seven languages. In 2024, it released Pharia1-LLM-7B, a 7-billion-parameter model available for non-commercial research on Hugging Face. Aleph Alpha has since pivoted: the Luminous API is deprecated, and the company now focuses on PhariaAI, a full-stack enterprise platform that integrates leading open-source models with proprietary explainability and governance features. PhariaAI deploys as SaaS, on-premise, private cloud, or air-gapped configurations. The suite includes PhariaAssistant (chat interface), PhariaStudio (development tools), PhariaOS (scaling and orchestration), and PhariaCatch (knowledge capture). Its AtMan explainability technology lets users trace model outputs to source documents. Aleph Alpha operates Alpha One, a commercial AI data center in Bavaria with 512 NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Clients include Deutsche Bank, Bosch, and German government agencies. In October 2025, founder Andrulis stepped down as CEO, replaced by co-CEOs Reto Spörri and Ilhan Scheer. KEY FEATURES: - PhariaAI sovereign enterprise platform with on-premise, private cloud, and air-gapped deployment - AtMan explainability technology for auditable, traceable AI outputs - Alpha One European data center in Bavaria for EU-sovereign compute - Pharia-1 open-weight 7B model for research alongside integrated open-source models - Enterprise clients in banking, defense, and German public sector