Cohere Signs Definitive Merger With Aleph Alpha at ~$20B Valuation

Cohere and Aleph Alpha have signed a definitive combination agreement, formalizing the framework the two AI developers first disclosed in April and valuing the combined company at roughly $20 billion, Reuters reported.

The Schwarz Group, which co-led Aleph Alpha's $500 million Series B in 2023, is committing $600 million to Cohere's upcoming Series E, expected to close later in 2026. The unified firm will be dual-headquartered in Berlin and Toronto, with Aleph Alpha's Heidelberg office kept on as a research center and combined headcount passing 1,000 across both continents.

Leadership shifts land on the Aleph Alpha side. Co-CEO Ilhan Scheer becomes chief operating officer of Cohere, and co-founder Samuel Weinbach, previously co-chief research officer, takes the chief research officer role. "No government or enterprise should have to choose between capable AI and control over their technology," Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez said in the joint announcement, framing the deal as the first "transatlantic sovereign AI solution."

The pitch is a play at European and Canadian governments and regulated enterprises that want frontier-scale models without standardizing on US or Chinese providers. It lands days after Gomez publicly called a rival-labs standards effort a "cartel", the second Cohere item we've tracked in a week.

The transaction remains subject to final regulatory approvals.