Aleph Alpha announcing creance.ai JV with PWC
Burda Principal Investments (BPI) invested in Aleph Alpha, for the first time, participating in their Series-B financing round to support the company in their product development and international expansion. To kick start these expansion plans, BPI recently hosted Aleph Alpha around the SuperAI Conference in Singapore, which was a week rich in local introductions, big announcements and exciting prospects for the company. At the conference itself, Aleph Alpha’s founder Jonas Andrulis joined BPI’s CEO Christian Teichmann on stage to speak about their strategic differentiation approach and share insights on their perspective on the South-East Asian ecosystem while our local BPI team headed by Neil Fong set up a series of meetings with potential clients for Aleph Alpha.
As a growth stage investor, BPI has been actively involved in the AI space since 2018, consistently seeking investment opportunities with compelling AI potential across all markets and regions in which we operate. We were thrilled to support the Aleph Alpha journey at such a pivotal time for the company. As one of the trailblazers in Europe, Aleph Alpha’s USP lies in the specialisation of own and Open-source LLMs (Large Language Models) adding proprietary innovation and customer’s domain expertise to deliver products focused on solving the most critical and complex business problems.
Jonas Andrulis, Aleph Alpha’s CEO, explains: ” Since we started in 2019 LLMs have become widely available and there are many great choices available. There are however many business-critical applications that don’t have easy answers and require humans to take responsibility for critical outcomes. With our product Pharia we have developed a sovereign stack allowing the development and deployment of AI value chains on sovereign infrastructure, with unrivalled transparency and proprietary innovations making results explainable and auditable.“
BPI supports Aleph Alpha’s launch in Southeast Asia.
Supporting our portfolio companies expand across regions, in particular between Asia and Europe, is pivotal to BPI and how we invest. We leverage the diversity and mixed experience of our international teams across Europe, the UK and Asia to provide expertise and access in these markets. When we invested in Aleph Alpha last year, we could see the potential for international expansion right away.
Aleph Alpha’s commitment to multilingual capabilities has been integral from its inception, reflecting its European roots. To further fuel their expansion plans, the company recently published a new kind of tokeniser (text splitter) capable of branching into fundamentally different languages with diverse alphabets and structures. “Our new tokenisation innovation is a game changer for language fairness and makes multilingual model even across different alphabets and for low-resource languages a feasible option for the first time.” Jonas Andrulis explains. Integrating different spoken languages into their technology aligns with Aleph Alpha’s international focus, including the launch in Asia, highlighting their progressive approach.
New joint venture with PwC, announced at SuperAI.
As one of the main sponsors of this year’s SuperAI Conference, we at BPI were thrilled to host the Aleph Alpha team in Singapore for the week. Around the conference we hosted several additional events to connect the company with relevant local players and foster productive discussions relevant to the ecosystem. A highlight was the panel discussion with BPI’s CEO Christian Teichmann, Aleph Alpha’s founder Jonas Andrulis and PwC board member Björn Viebrock, to speak about what AI is, what it is not and what it could become.
As part of their vision to layer on top of their foundational LLM, Aleph Alpha is specialising its offer into selected vertical applications in sectors such as compliance, legal, government and manufacturing. It was on stage during this panel discussion that Jonas Andrulis and Björn Viebrock announced their newly founded product creance.ai, a joint venture launched by Aleph Alpha and PwC which is set to revolutionise compliance workflows in the corporate space. Notorious for constantly evolving regulations and a shortage of specialised talent, the compliance sector is an obvious candidate for disruption and radical innovation. The creance.ai offering is set to streamline cumbersome processes including screening thousands of contracts for errors, making it invaluable for organisations in highly regulated industries.
Looking forward, the company developed a dedicated offer for government use-cases that is already in production for hundreds of thousands of users. This innovation comes with perfect timing as public administration faces a declining workforce and at the same time increasing complexity in the topics they face. Similarly, specific AI applications could assist the manufacturing industry to improve efficiency and the management of complex machinery and technical products, overwhelming paperwork, and crucial professionals leaving into retirement. In all these areas though, Jonas Andrulis emphasised the importance of partnering with established industry leaders such as PwC in order to leverage each other’s expertise:
“Tech companies can build impressive technology, but they cannot match the decades of industry knowledge of companies like PwC. Our collaboration allows us to combine cutting-edge tech with deep industry expertise, ensuring effective and trustful human decision-making.“
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More InformationYouTube Video of Panel Talk: What AI Is, What AI is Not, and What AI Could Become – SuperAI 2024
Christian Teichmann, CEO of BPI, Jonas Andrulis, CEO and founder of Aleph Alpha, and Björn Viebrock, PwC board member, together on stage © BPI
We came away from the trip inspired and look forward to the next steps of the journey together.
Find out more about Aleph Alpha here.