SAP Invests in Leading Generative AI innovators – Aleph Alpha, Anthropic, and Cohere

SAP has announced strategic investments in three leading Generative AI innovators – Aleph Alpha GmbH, Anthropic PBC, and Cohere. This strategic move reinforces SAP’s open ecosystem approach to AI, leveraging the best technology to embed AI across the SAP portfolio. Aleph Alpha, Anthropic, and Cohere are market leaders in the generative AI and possess unique innovative capabilities to transform industries with their offerings.

SAP’s approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) involves a multifaceted strategy comprising substantial direct investments, robust research and development for AI applications, and collaborations with third-party entities including Microsoft, Google Cloud, and IBM. SAP’s renewed commitment to ethically designed generative AI, aimed at boosting business productivity, is exemplified by their investments in the three innovators.

SAP is also expediting AI innovation by integrating startups within its partner network through the SAP.iO Foundries program, its in-house accelerator. Sapphire Ventures, an international venture capital firm with a focus on software, underwritten by SAP, has pledged over US$1 billion towards fostering AI-driven enterprise technology startups.

Aleph Alpha: The company is the only European company researching, developing and operationalizing a new AI base technology for the public and private sector. Following the principles of sovereignty, excellence and fairness, the company is involved in cutting-edge AI research, perform robust and scalable engineering and enable partners to leverage our technology into a wide range of creative use-cases. The company has developed a full-stack, generative AI paltform focused on complex and critical enterprise use cases and was the first company to offer multimodal, next-generation large language models and achieve state-of-the-art results with a model trained equally on several European languages. The company focuses on interoperability, data privacy and security, offering both AI as a service as well as multi-cloud and on-premise installation. SAP previously announced Aleph Alpha as an SAP partner participating in the SAP PartnerEdge® program on the “Build” track.

Anthropic PBC: An AI safety and research company developing AI systems that are helpful, honest and harmless, Anthropic is dedicated to building systems that people can rely on and generating research about the opportunities and risks of AI. Anthropic’s AI assistant, Claude, employs a principled methodology and communicates with users adhering to a set of guidelines designed by Anthropic, with a strong focus on dependability and safety. Claude assists users in an array of tasks such as generating responses, coding, streamlining workflows, and text processing – which encompasses editing, rewriting, summarizing, classifying, among others – all within the framework of organic conversations.

Cohere: A leading enterprise AI company, Cohere provides access to advanced Large Language Models and NLP tools through one easy-to-use API.  Cohere’s cutting-edge large language models are built on Transformer architecture and trained on supercomputers, providing NLP solutions that don’t need expensive ML development. Cohere’s platform has been designed to be cloud-neutral, enabling businesses to select their preferred cloud providers. It can be accessed via API as a managed service and can be implemented either on virtual private clouds or on-premise, catering to the specific data location needs of different companies.

Sapphire Ventures: Sapphire Ventures LLC, backed by SAP, is a global venture capital firm that partners with forward-thinking teams and venture funds to impact businesses. Being a limited partner in Sapphire Ventures provides SAP clients with privileged early access to innovative solutions from the startup ecosystem. Recently, Sapphire Ventures announced an investment commitment exceeding US$1 billion towards the upcoming wave of AI-enabled enterprise technology startups, in addition to their current investments in AI-driven enterprise startups such as Clari Inc., DataRobot Inc., MoveWORK International, and ThoughtSpot Inc.