Cohere and Aleph Alpha sign merger agreement

Background

Aleph Alpha is a German AI company with its headquarters in Heidelberg. Schwarz Group was already one of its backers before the deal. Aleph Alpha had raised about $126 million in venture funding ^[1][2]. Cohere, which builds large language models for business customers, had been valued at about $7 billion in September 2025 ^[1][2]. A valuation is the value investors place on a company, and a merger combines two companies into one.

A merger agreement is the contract that sets out the terms on which two companies agree to combine. It covers the shape of the deal, how it is financed, and what must happen before it can take effect.

What happened

On 16 September 2026 Cohere and Aleph Alpha signed a merger agreement. The two companies had first announced the plan in April 2026 ^[1]. The combined company is reportedly worth about $20 billion ^[1].

Key details

Schwarz Group, an existing Aleph Alpha backer, planned to provide €500 million (about $573 million) of financing for the deal ^[1]. The combined company will use the Cohere brand, with dual headquarters in Toronto and Berlin. Aleph Alpha's Heidelberg headquarters becomes an AI research centre ^[1].

The deal also includes a broader partnership with Schwarz Group's STACKIT cloud unit. It still awaited regulatory approval when the source reported on it ^[1].

Impact

The entry records the agreement and the terms reported for it. Because the deal still needed regulatory approval when it was reported, its final form may differ from the plan described here. The dual headquarters and the research centre in Heidelberg are the most concrete details in the reports. Regulatory approval is the review that government or competition authorities carry out before a deal can close. Such a review can delay a deal or change its terms, so the agreement described here should be read as a plan rather than a completed transaction.