Samuel Weinbach is a co-founder of Aleph Alpha GmbH. He and Jonas Andrulis registered the company in Heidelberg on 27 February 2019. Their aim was a European alternative to US language models, for customers wary of sending data abroad.
A seed round of €5.3 million came in 2020 and €23 million followed in 2021. That year the team added models that read both text and images. In 2023 it presented Multifusion at NeurIPS. In November 2023 a round was announced at $500 million.
The company later moved toward helping clients run AI in-house. In January 2026 Andrulis ceased to be a managing director. In April 2026 Cohere announced that it would acquire Aleph Alpha, and a definitive merger agreement was signed in September 2026.
In October 2026 the company released Kolibri, an open-weight model under the Apache 2.0 licence. The Heidelberg site is to stay as a research centre.