German startup Aleph Alpha raises $27M Series A round to build ‘Europe’s OpenAI’
With Microsoft now being an investor in OpenAI the field now more open for new insurgents into the open-source AI arena. Now a German company hopes to take on the next AI mantle and produce something akin to the success of the GPT-3 AI model.
German AI startup Aleph Alpha has now raised €23 million / $27 million in a Series A funding co-led by Earlybird VC, Lakestar, and UVC Partners. Following a seed round of €5.3 million from LEA Partners, 468 Capital, and Cavalry Ventures in November 2020, Aleph Alpha has now raised a total of €28.3 million (people in $33.3 million).
The idea behind Aleph Alpha is that it researches, develops, and “operationalizes” large AI systems towards generalizable AI, offering GPT-3-like text, vision and strategy AI models. The platform will run a public API enabling public and private sectors to run their own AI experiments and develop new business models.
The team says it will have a strong commitment to open-source communities (such as Eleuther.AI), academic partnerships, and will be pushing “European values and ethical standards,” it says, “supporting fairer access to modern AI research – aimed at counteracting ongoing ‘de-democratization’, monopolization, and loss of control or transparency.” The move is clearly meant to be a stake in the ground in the international world of AI development.
