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European hope to rival OpenAI, Aleph Alpha, may have just raised nearly 500 million euros ($534 million) from investors this week, but its co-founder said Friday that the start-up up was fighting to even survive.
An alliance of investors, including the Schwarz Group, owner of Lidl, Bosch, SAP and Hewlett Packard Enterprises, this week injected 467 million euros into the German artificial intelligence company.
Before the cash injection, the company with 60 employees founded in 2019 only had capital of 28 million euros.
But Jonas Andrulis, co-founder of the company, explained to the business daily Handelsblatt the scale of the challenge facing the company.
“The moment I found out OpenAI was getting another $13 billion, I knew we were in existential danger,” Andrulis said in the interview published Friday.
But since Microsoft-backed OpenAI launched ChatGPT about a year ago, there has been a fierce race between tech’s biggest players like Google and Meta for a share of the market.
“Microsoft recognized that there is nothing more important than technology and decided to go for a dominant position“Andrulis said, adding that OpenAI “threatens our existence.”
Faced with American domination, “let’s not have any illusions: the mission of European technological sovereignty is against all odds,” declared the former Apple engineer.
Aleph Alpha specializes in generative AI, software that can produce text, images, or other media that resembles those created by humans.
Much of what he also advocates for is data sovereignty or data protection – an issue that has become sensitive as cases of state-backed cyberespionage or hacking increase.
The company also benefits from a partnership with an AI innovation center in Heilbronn, supported by the foundation of Lidl founder Dieter Schwarz.
