Bosch Ventures co-leads investment round in AI startup Aleph Alpha

Collaboration in addition to investment: Bosch and Aleph Alpha aim to benefit from each other’s expertise.

Bosch Ventures, the Bosch Group’s corporate venture capital unit, is co-leading the Series-B investment round in the AI startup Aleph Alpha together with companies from the Schwarz Group and the Innovation Park AI (Ipai) in Heilbronn, Germany. Aleph Alpha will receive more than USD 500 million in funding from a strong industry consortium comprising seven new investors, existing investors are joining the oversubscribed round. Thanks to this financial support, the startup will have even better opportunities to take its AI research further and to accelerate the development and commercialization of generative AI in complex and critical applications in areas such as manufacturing, healthcare, finance, law, government, and security.

“Generative AI is ushering in a new era of collaboration between humans and machines. Our partners are industry leaders who offer enormous potential for innovation and scaling, and we are committed to building these partnerships to leading positions in their respective industries. Our unique technology’s explainability and trustworthiness plays a crucial role in this,” says Aleph Alpha founder and CEO Jonas Andrulis. Based on the proprietary research and development of large language models, Aleph Alpha offers generative AI solutions for critical and complex application areas in companies and public institutions.

As one of Europe’s largest corporate venture capital investors, Bosch Ventures specializes in investments in innovative technology startups. Its active portfolio includes more than 60 companies in several fields, mainly AI, the internet of things (AIoT), semiconductors, and quantum computing. “We firmly believe that generative AI has the potential to change many sectors of industry, so we have high hopes for future developments from Aleph Alpha with a focus on trustworthy and explainable AI solutions,” says Dr. Ingo Ramesohl, managing director of Bosch Ventures.

The consortium is led by Bosch Ventures, the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (Ipai), and the companies of the Schwarz Group. Other new investors include the Berlin-based Christ & Company Consulting, the U.S. edge-to-cloud company Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the German software company SAP, and Burda Principal Investments. Existing institutional investors are also participating and make up the rest of the oversubscribed round.

Generative AI offers a huge increase in productivity. It allows people to use natural language to consolidate complex information from different sources. Thanks to generative AI, even non-IT-savvy users will find it easy to deal with IT systems and use it for tasks such as retrieving production data from an IT system. Interaction in natural language enables a much broader impact – AI is no longer a topic only for experts. What makes these new models especially powerful compared to previous AI models is that they are trained on vast amounts of data. “Generative AI is a boost to innovation. It can transform industry in much the same way as the invention of the computer,” says Dr. Tanja Rückert, member of the Bosch board of management. “Actively developing generative AI will be crucial for Europe’s technological sovereignty. That’s why we at Bosch are opening up areas of application and business models and playing a key role in shaping this technology in collaboration with other companies.”

In addition to the investment by Bosch Ventures, Bosch plans to tap the potential of generative AI in a more direct partnership with Aleph Alpha. Together, the two companies aim to jointly implement new use cases for Bosch associates and customers alike, using the strengths specific to Aleph Alpha. The aim is to make this an enduring partnership. Bosch and Aleph Alpha want to learn from each other, benefit from each other’s know-how, and work together on cross-domain use cases. Aleph Alpha’s solutions can also be operated in Bosch’s own data centers and thus on Bosch’s own hardware. This means greater security for confidential data. In addition to Aleph Alpha, Bosch is working on generative AI with Microsoft, Google, and AWS.

Source: https://www.rbvc.com/