German AI startup Aleph Alpha announced on Thursday it would acquire AI text-processing startup thingsThinking for an undisclosed amount.
Aleph Alpha, once hailed as a European leader in large language models (LLM) to rival OpenAI and other industry leaders, has since pivoted to a B2B consultancy model, offering a so-called “generative AI operating system” for large enterprises and other organisations, helping them integrate AI internally.
In 2023, the company raised €460m in funding, one of Europe’s largest AI rounds at the time. But as competition in the LLM space heated up, Aleph Alpha announced it was moving away from training its own models to focus on B2B customers.
The acquisition of thingsTHINKING — which says its ‘semantha’ AI platform provides deep understanding of natural language — will enable Aleph Alpha to add another product to its full-stack platform PhariaAI, while hoovering up the smaller company’s small team of experts.
The deal means Aleph Alpha will gain access to thingsThinking’s domain-specific AI, which has been trained and deployed in the industrial and financial services sectors in particular.
In turn, thingsThinking will gain access to PhariaAI to help it build and scale generative AI solutions, and get access to the Pharia Industrial Suite to support its product development and operations.
The acquisition marks Aleph Alpha’s second acquisition, following its purchase of Berlin-based AI startup Lengoo, an enterprise platform for AI systems, last year.
Aleph Alpha appears to be ramping up hiring, with 38 positions across various departments open on its job page.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/aleph-alpha-acquires-thingsthinking/
