The startup launched last month and is backed by consultancy Roland Berger.
The co-founder and former CEO of high-profile German AI startup Aleph Alpha has today revealed fresh details about his new AI startup, which launched last month and is backed by a multi-million-dollar investment from the German consultancy Roland Berger.
The new startup founded by Jonas Andrulis, who left Aleph Alpha last year after six years leading it, is developing what it calls “collaborative AI systems”, which are designed to address the challenge in industrial AI applications of a lack of human integration into complex, AI-driven processes.
It says in industrial environments, automated AI systems alone are not sufficient and human judgement remains critical.
Its tech means that AI agents can ask humans clarifying questions, helping negate hallucinations, it says.
Today the startup revealed its name, CNTR (the name refers to the so-called “centaur chess” where teams of humans and computers play together) and said that Apple engineer Alejandro Molina was relocating from the US West Coast to join the startup as its CTO in Germany.
Molina has also previously worked for Amazon and Aleph Alpha.
Andrulis said: “Most AI systems today are built to replace human labour. Humans are reduced to temporary gap-fillers. That’s a dead end—for the technology itself as well as for the companies that are putting their most valuable assets at risk: their teams and their culture.
“We’ve founded CNTR so that humans and machines can learn, make decisions, and solve problems together—not competing, but collaborating with each other.”
Aleph Alpha was originally one of the few European LLM startups but subsequently pivoted from building LLMs to helping businesses and governments use AI.