Aleph Alpha acquires semantics specialist Thingsthinking

Aleph Alpha, Germany’s largest developer of artificial intelligence (AI) for public authorities and companies, is acquiring a smaller German AI company: Semantha operator Thingsthinking from Karlsruhe. No financial details are known. Semantha is a platform for, as the name suggests, semantics, i.e. capturing the meaning of language.

“Our software understands natural language regardless of the choice of words. It is able to read large amounts of text and finds the content you are looking for, regardless of how it was formulated,” explained Thingsthinking founder Sven Körner in an interview with heise online in 2020, “For example: someone uses the search function to find the sentence ‘The road was icy’ in a document. But the document says: “The road was slippery”. Although both sentences mean the same thing, there are no hits in the traditional search because different words were used. Our software finds the sentences using artificial intelligence. Semantics means meaning, hence the name of our product Semantha.”

Instead of searching for specific words, Semantha is designed to find meanings. The company, which was founded in 2017, has customers in the automotive, finance and administration sectors in particular. Thingsthinking created the AI-supported learning assistant AIEDN as part of a research project.

Aleph Alpha needs AI experts

Aleph Alpha, which is two years younger, focuses on the PhariaAI platform. It enables the development, operation and scaling of generative AI applications. Both companies are German start-ups and both want to give their customers “sovereignty”, meaning that they remain masters of their data and develop their own AI expertise. Aleph Alpha’s best-known customer is the German Federal Employment Agency.

“Thingsthinking’s AI platform and its team of experts with their in-depth industry knowledge are a valuable addition to Aleph Alpha’s service portfolio,” according to the merger announcement published last week. Accordingly, most of the employees of the acquired Karlsruhe-based company should not have to worry about their jobs, as their knowledge and skills are a key reason for the acquisition of the company.

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