European OpenAI Competitor Aleph Alpha Raises $500M

Germany-based raised a $500 million Series B as AI startups outside the U.S. continue to see bigger rounds.

The round was led by the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence, and the companies of . Other new investors include , , and .

Founded in 2019, Aleph Alpha allows companies to develop and deploy large language and multimodal models. Its presence in Europe may help set it apart from other U.S.-based startups like and as more regulations are put into place around the world.

鈥淭he thought of having our own sovereignty in the AI sector is extremely important,鈥� Germany鈥檚 Vice Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck said at a about the investment. 鈥淚f Europe has the best regulation but no European companies, we haven鈥檛 won much.鈥�

Aleph Alpha did not announce a valuation with the new round. The company has now raised more than $640 million, .

Money everywhere

AI startups raising big cash obviously is not new. OpenAI has raised billions of dollars this year, and less than two weeks ago agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic 鈥� just a month after Anthropic inked a deal with to invest up to $4 billion.

However, the last few months seem to have witnessed a pickup in big AI investment outside the U.S.

In late August, Israel-based AI startup locked up a $155 million Series C from investors that include and . The startup has its own proprietary large language models, called Jurassic-2. Those models help power the company鈥檚 developer platform for building custom text-based business applications and its multilingual reading and writing AI assistant.

Then late last month it was another OpenAI and Anthropic competitor 鈥� Paris-based 鈥� plans to raise an additional $300 million from investors. The raise would come less than five months after the startup 鈥� developing an open-source large language model 鈥� raised a seed round worth approximately $111 million led by .

It seems if you are an AI startup anywhere in the world, investors will find you.