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.
...In other words, they want to firmly center themselves in the EU under EU law, GDPR and regulation. They may well prove a useful “Fortress Europe” for the company.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/27/german-startup-aleph-alpha-raises-27m-series-a-round-to-build-europes-openai/
