Upheaval at Aleph Alpha: Founder leaves, Schwarz Group moves up

The founder of Heidelberg-based AI company Aleph Alpha, Jonas Andrulis, is relinquishing his position as Managing Director with immediate effect. Instead, he is taking over the chairmanship of the company’s advisory board, where he will act in an advisory capacity in the future. Carsten Dirks, who is responsible for the operational business, is also leaving the company “by mutual agreement”, according to the press release on the reorganization.

The new management team will consist of Reto Spörri and Ilhan Scheer. These are not unknown personalities. Spörri was previously a divisional director at the Schwarz Group, where he was responsible for Lidle’s e-commerce division, according to Wirtschaftswoche. In July, he was installed as Co-Managing Director of Aleph Alpha alongside Andrulis. At the same time, Scheer, who came from strategy consultancy Accenture, joined the management team as Head of Growth. Scheer will take over as Managing Director together with Spörri from January 2026.

The way in which Aleph Alpha communicated the change in leadership is considered unusual in the industry. For example, the press release does not contain a quote in which Andrulis himself explains his retirement. The press office also did not provide a statement when asked by Handelsblatt. The terse formulation that Andrulis will “continue to actively and energetically support the company” as Chairman of the Advisory Board leaves plenty of room for interpretation. According to Handelsblatt, this reinforces the impression that the founder has been marginalised.

Growing influence of the Schwarz Group

According to industry experts, the reorganization points to the increasing influence of the Schwarz Group. The retail group includes Lidl and Kaufland, among others. With the “Schwarz Digits” division founded in 2023, the company also wants to become a serious competitor to Amazon Web Services (AWS) from Amazon or Azure from Microsoft.

The retail group is one of Aleph Alpha’s largest shareholders and, according to Handelsblatt, has gained considerable influence over the strategic direction of Aleph Alpha through Schwarz Digits. The companies have already worked together on AI and cloud offerings for the public sector. There has therefore been speculation in industry circles for months about a possible complete takeover of the start-up by the retail group.

According to Handelsblatt, Spörri will continue to receive remuneration from the Schwarz Group in addition to his salary at Aleph Alpha. He has been granted a secondary employment license for this purpose. Aleph Alpha did not respond to an inquiry from the newspaper.

German answer to OpenAI

Aleph Alpha was considered the German answer to OpenAI and other US AI giants. Andrulis founded the company in 2019 with the mission of making Europe independent in AI development. However, the high expectations were only partially fulfilled. While competitors such as French company Mistral are now valued at almost twelve billion euros, Aleph Alpha’s most recent valuation is around half a billion euros, according to Handelsblatt.

The company has had to fundamentally change its strategy and specialize in applications for public authorities and individual industrial sectors. Andrulis also explained in an interview with heise online in November 2024: “We can’t race to spend money with OpenAI. That’s why we’re not chasing after ChatGPT as a B2C product.”

With the PhariaAI platform, which can also integrate other language models, Aleph Alpha wants to position itself as a technology provider for companies that do not want to pass on their data to US providers.

The reorganization raises whether Aleph Alpha can and wants to continue to pursue its original vision of European AI sovereignty under the new management – or whether it will increasingly become a building block in the Schwarz Group’s technology strategy.

(ssi)