Cohere and Aleph Alpha have signed a definitive business combination agreement that will bring together the Canadian and German AI companies under the Cohere name, creating what the companies describe as the first transatlantic sovereign AI provider.
The agreement follows the companies’ April announcement outlining plans to combine. The transaction remains subject to final regulatory approvals and is expected to close later in 2026.
The combined company will focus on providing secure, governable AI infrastructure and foundation models for governments, enterprises and highly regulated industries that want to maintain control over sensitive data, deployment environments and technology.
Cohere and Aleph Alpha are positioning the transaction around the growing importance of digital sovereignty as governments and businesses seek alternatives to AI systems that may depend on infrastructure, governance or legal frameworks outside their home jurisdictions.
The unified company will operate globally as Cohere while maintaining significant operations in both Canada and Germany.
Cohere plans to establish dual headquarters in Toronto and Berlin, retain Aleph Alpha’s Heidelberg office as a research center and maintain leadership and R&D functions across both countries.
The combination will increase Cohere’s employee base to more than 1,000 people across the two continents.
The companies said the merger will combine Cohere’s enterprise AI platform, deployment capabilities and international reach with Aleph Alpha’s research expertise and public-sector relationships in Europe.
Aleph Alpha has focused heavily on specialized language models for governments and regulated organizations, while Cohere has developed foundation models and enterprise AI products designed to run across public cloud, private infrastructure and air-gapped environments.
The companies believe those capabilities are increasingly important for customers that need AI systems capable of operating within strict regulatory, data protection and security requirements.
The combined company will operate under Canadian and German legal and regulatory frameworks, including rules governing sensitive data and technology.
Its governance structure will include safeguards intended to reinforce operational control, accountability and compliance across both markets.
Cohere said the transaction will make it the first foundation model developer anchored on both sides of the Atlantic with an AI offering designed around the sovereignty requirements of Canada and Germany.
The combination also adds two senior Aleph Alpha executives to Cohere’s leadership team.
Ilhan Scheer, currently Co-CEO of Aleph Alpha, will become Chief Operating Officer of Cohere when the transaction closes.
Scheer will oversee Cohere’s global operating model and organizational scaling. Before Aleph Alpha, he founded data analytics and transformation company fable+, which was acquired by Accenture, where he later served as a Managing Director overseeing enterprise transformation products.
Samuel Weinbach, Aleph Alpha’s co-founder and Co-Chief Research Officer, will become Cohere’s Chief Research Officer.
His research experience spans tokenization, language model training, explainability and image generation. Both appointments are contingent on completion of the transaction.
The companies are also expanding their relationship with Schwarz Group companies.
Cohere plans to advance work with Schwarz Digits to provide sovereign AI through STACKIT, Schwarz Digits’ cloud platform.
STACKIT is being positioned as part of Europe’s broader digital sovereignty infrastructure, allowing organizations to deploy AI while keeping data and technology within infrastructure designed around European security and privacy requirements.
That relationship could become strategically important as European governments and enterprises increasingly seek AI systems that can be deployed without relying entirely on U.S.-based hyperscale cloud providers or closed AI platforms.
Cohere’s existing platform is designed to provide deployment flexibility across cloud environments, private on-premises systems and fully air-gapped infrastructure.
The company has raised approximately $1.6 billion from investors including NVIDIA, AMD Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Oracle, Cisco, Radical Ventures, Inovia Capital, PSP Investments, HOOPP and BDC, along with AI researchers including Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Pieter Abbeel and Raquel Urtasun.
Aleph Alpha was founded in 2019 and has built specialized large language models for businesses and public-sector organizations seeking greater control over data, model behavior and infrastructure.
The company currently employs around 200 people across four locations in Germany.
The transaction comes as sovereignty becomes a more prominent issue in enterprise AI procurement.
Governments and companies increasingly want to know where AI models are hosted, which legal systems govern the infrastructure, how sensitive information is handled and whether critical technology can remain operational without depending on foreign-controlled platforms.
Cohere and Aleph Alpha are attempting to turn those concerns into a differentiated market position.
Rather than competing solely on model performance, the combined company is emphasizing governance, deployment flexibility, institutional trust and regional control alongside frontier AI capabilities.
If completed, the transaction will create a larger AI company with major operating bases in North America and Europe, expanded public-sector relationships and a broader foundation for serving highly regulated customers seeking alternatives to conventional global AI platforms.
KEY QUOTES:
“No government or enterprise should have to choose between capable AI and control over their technology. That belief is exactly why we’re joining forces with Aleph Alpha to enhance the talent, infrastructure and institutional trust behind our mission. Together, we’ll move faster to meet the rising global demand for frontier AI that’s powerful enough to compete, but secure and governable enough to trust.”
Aidan Gomez, Co-Founder and CEO of Cohere
“Over the past twelve months, we have sharpened our focus on specialized language models for governments and regulated industries. Cohere is a strong strategic fit for this work, bringing global reach and deployment capabilities that complement our research expertise. Together, we can bring what our team has built to more organizations worldwide.”
Ilhan Scheer, Co-CEO of Aleph Alpha
“Digital sovereignty is not about going it alone, but about strategically joining forces. This transatlantic alliance represents a massive leap forward accelerating the development of an independent AI infrastructure.”
Christian Müller, CEO of Schwarz Digits
