Canadian AI lab Cohere announced on Friday that it planned to acquire German AI company Aleph Alpha, as it eyed major expansion in Europe.
As part of the deal, Schwarz Group — a key backer of Aleph Alpha — plans to invest $600 million in Cohere’s upcoming Series E round. The company expects to close that round sometime in 2026, a source familiar with Cohere’s plans told CNBC.
The deal hasn’t closed, and the acquisition is subject to regulatory conditions being met. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Founded in 2019, Cohere has already raised $1.6 billion from investors including Nvidia and AMD. It was valued at $7 billion in 2025.
“Combining the strengths of Cohere and Aleph Alpha accelerates our global expansion and advances our mission to deliver sovereign AI to nations around the world,” said Aidan Gomez, cofounder and CEO at Cohere, in a statement.
“This transatlantic partnership unlocks the massive scale, robust infrastructure, and world-class R&D talent required to meet that demand,” he added. “Built on the bedrock of shared Canadian and German values — where privacy, security and responsible innovation are paramount — we are uniquely positioned to be the world’s trusted AI partner.”
Through the planned deal, Cohere will look to boost its offering of secure customized AI for highly-regulated sectors, including the public sector, finance, defense, energy, manufacturing, telecommunications and healthcare.
Aleph Alpha’s experience in deploying AI in long-standing customer relationships provides an important foundation of this sovereign offering, Cohere said.
“The deal gives Cohere access to Europe’s largest economy,” the source told CNBC. “[The company] had been looking to expand throughout Europe, and this speeds up the process a lot.”
Aleph Alpha’s existing commercial contracts with the German public sector were also an attraction, they added. The company works with the German ministry for digital affairs and state modernization and the Baden-Württemberg regional government.
Aleph Alpha was founded in 2019 to build large language models (LLMs) before pivoting to developing AI applications. It raised more than $600 million in investor and grant funding, according to Dealroom.
“Together with Cohere, we are building a real counterweight for organizations that refuse to outsource control over their AI to a single provider or jurisdiction, giving European institutions and enterprises access to powerful, yet controllable AI they can truly own,” said Ilhan Scheer, Co-CEO of Aleph Alpha.
