The European AI darling once hyped as “Germany’s OpenAI” is doing a reality check. Jonas Andrulis, the visionary behind Aleph Alpha, is stepping down as CEO after six years in the driver’s seat. He’s not bailing — just moving upstairs to chair the advisory board while a new duo takes the wheel.
Reto Spörri, the former commercial lead at Lidl’s parent group Schwarz, and Ilhan Scheer, Aleph’s own chief growth officer, are now co-CEOs. A retail operator and a growth strategist — not exactly your standard research-lab dream team. But that’s the point.
Aleph Alpha’s race to build a “sovereign European LLM” has slowed. The company raised around $500 million in 2023 — from Bosch Ventures, SAP, and Schwarz Group — but now the narrative is shifting. Instead of chasing OpenAI and Anthropic up the parameter mountain, the German firm is repositioning for the real world: government contracts, enterprise deployment, and sovereign-grade AI consulting.
This is Europe’s AI maturity moment. The continent’s tech playbook has been flooded with “sovereign champions” chasing impossible scale. Aleph Alpha seems to be saying: we’re done playing that game. The focus now is less about training trillion-parameter models and more about embedding explainable AI into the workflows that actually matter — public infrastructure, regulated industries, sensitive data environments.
Internally, this leadership rotation is as much about optics as operations. Andrulis, a deep-tech founder through and through, hands over to executives who know how to structure revenue, deliver contracts, and talk to ministries instead of research labs. It’s what happens when a startup grows up.
The firm even postponed its “strategy day” to give Spörri a hundred days to recalibrate. Expect less frontier rhetoric, more boardroom pragmatism.
Zoom out, and this move reads as a quiet admission: Europe isn’t going to out-scale Silicon Valley in foundation models — but it might out-govern it. Aleph Alpha wants to own that lane. The firm has been pitching itself as a trusted AI partner for sovereign infrastructure, where transparency trumps brute compute.
Still, investors will want to see traction. Can a lab built on research ambition translate into steady enterprise revenue? Can a company that raised half a billion euros sustain growth without the hype engine of “we’re Europe’s OpenAI”?
Aleph Alpha’s next act looks less like a moonshot, more like a controlled glide into profitability. And maybe that’s the smartest play in a market finally sobering up from the AI gold rush.
Stay bullish.
