You searched for "fluado vs Aleph Alpha." Both answer the same question a German enterprise is asking — can we use AI without handing our data to a US hyperscaler — and both answer it in Europe. The difference is not sovereignty. It is who installs the thing, who staffs it, and who is named as the operator when a regulator asks.
What does Aleph Alpha actually sell?
Aleph Alpha sells language models and the platform to run them. The Heidelberg company describes its work as specialised large language models "for a sovereign Europe," designed, built and deployed in close partnership with each customer, with every model running on European infrastructure. Its customers are enterprises and public institutions — government agencies, chip manufacturers, automotive suppliers, finance.
The platform around those models is PhariaAI, an enterprise AI suite documented as deployable on-premise or hosted. It is model-agnostic — Aleph Alpha's own models or third-party and open-source ones — and it is assembled from components your IT organisation runs: PhariaAssistant as the chat and assistant interface, PhariaStudio to build assistants and workflows, PhariaOS to deploy and scale the workloads and manage access to AI resources, plus PhariaCatch and PhariaFiles for knowledge and document handling. Deployment options documented for regulated environments include on-premises, private VPC, air-gapped and hybrid architectures, and PhariaAI is also available as a managed service on STACKIT. Pricing is enterprise and quoted on request.
That is a capable stack, and it assumes something specific about you: that you have an IT organisation ready to install a platform, a team to build the assistants inside PhariaStudio, and someone who owns the result once the engagement ends.
Who operates the system after it is installed?
Your organisation does. That is the defining difference, and it is not a criticism of the platform — it is what a platform is. Someone on your side decides what the assistant should do, builds it in the studio, tests it against your real documents, keeps it correct as the process changes, and answers for its output. The sovereignty is genuine. The operational and regulatory load sits with you.
fluado is not a platform. There is nothing to install, no studio for your team to learn, and no internal owner to appoint. We build the agents, we run them, and we maintain the record of what they did.
What does fluado do differently?
fluado starts from the work rather than from a deployment. A product specification arrives in Outlook — the agent reads it, validates it against your quality standards in SharePoint, flags the exceptions, and routes the result to the right person in Teams. Nobody on your side configured a model, chose a context window, or logged into a studio. You described the work; we built the agent that does it and we keep it right when the process moves.
When the specification format changes, you tell us. That is the whole interface.
Where does your data run, and who owns the company running it?
For fluado: the website, backend, database and authentication run on fluado's own servers in German datacentres at Hetzner in Falkenstein and Nürnberg. Model inference runs on Google Cloud Vertex AI in EU regions — Belgium and the Netherlands — under standard contractual clauses and the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. The complete list of processors, with server locations, is published at /processors. There is no region for you to select, because there is only one configuration.
For Aleph Alpha, the hosting answer depends on which deployment you buy, and there is a second fact a sovereignty-driven buyer should have. In September 2026 Aleph Alpha signed a definitive merger agreement with the Canadian company Cohere at a combined valuation of roughly 20 billion US dollars. The combined company will operate under the Cohere name with headquarters in Toronto and Berlin; the Heidelberg site continues as a research centre, and Germany's Schwarz Group committed 600 million US dollars to the financing. The transaction remains subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close during 2026.
That changes nothing about where a given PhariaAI installation runs. It does change the answer to "who ultimately controls the vendor," which is a question most sovereignty requirements ask in writing. fluado is a German company with two founders and no acquirer.
Who is accountable when a regulator asks?
Under the EU AI Act, the deployer obligations for an autonomous system follow whoever puts it into service. Install a platform and build your own assistants on it, and your organisation is the deployer of record: the risk assessment, the human oversight arrangements, the incident logging and the documentation are yours to produce.
fluado is a managed service. We deploy the agents, we build the audit trails, we maintain the compliance documentation, and we share the deployer record with you. When a regulator asks why the agent rejected a specification on a Tuesday in March, the answer is a structured log that we keep, not a project someone has to start.
Who we are
fluado is a German company. When you work with us, you work with the founding team. Our phone number is on the website. We pick up.
If your challenge is operational — document reviews, compliance checks, specification management — and you need the work done rather than a platform to do it on, that is what we built fluado for.
Book a demo · contact@fluado.com · +49 176 2330 6503
Frequently asked questions
Our procurement requires a sovereign, on-premise deployment. Doesn't that rule fluado out?
It rules out most things, including a managed service, so the question worth asking first is what the requirement is protecting. Usually it is three specific commitments: personal data stays in the EU, no US provider can be compelled to hand it over, and you can prove both to an auditor. fluado answers those with German servers it owns, a published processor list with locations, and an audit trail maintained as part of the service. If your requirement is literally a rack in your own building, say so on the call and we will tell you straight away whether we fit.
We are shortlisting on European sovereignty. Does the Cohere merger matter?
It matters to the paperwork, not to the running system. A sovereignty requirement normally asks two separate questions: where the data is processed, and who controls the entity processing it. The first is answered by the deployment. The second is answered by the cap table, and for a combined Canadian-German company operating under a Canadian name, that answer is longer than it was. fluado's is short: a German UG in Berlin, owned by its two founders.
Aleph Alpha builds its own models. Isn't that stronger than using someone else's?
It is a different business. Aleph Alpha's work is the model layer and the platform to serve it; fluado's work is the agent that completes a process inside Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Slack and SAP, and the evidence of how it did so. We select and operate models for the task rather than training our own, which is why the conversation with us is about your specification review and not about parameter counts.
What would we have to staff to get value out of each?
A platform needs an owner: someone to install it, build the assistants, test them against real documents, and keep them correct as processes change. That is a role, not a ticket. fluado needs a contact person who knows the process and can tell us when it changes. We do the rest, including the compliance documentation. Contact us for a quote tied to the process you want automated.