Head of Business Development

A German AI startup backed by General Catalyst is considering opening a US office, its first overseas office.Founded in 2023, Langdock has an office in Berlin but its executives are spending a considerable amount of time in New York and San Francisco.Lennard Schmidt, Langdock CEO and co-founder, says the US is “more dynamic when it comes to AI than Europe”.He said: “I think for us it’s still on the table if we move to the US.”Schmidt said that should the startup open an office in the US, it would retain its Berlin office.Schmidt also pointed out that Germany was behind the US and UK in commercialising AI research.He said: “In Germany we have these very established institutions around doing deep research, what we do lack is the commercial aspect of taking that research and commercialising some of it.“I feel the UK is in a better position right now, but also Paris, given their ties to the big American companies that have research facilities there.”Germany has some well-known AI companies, such as Helsing, Aleph Alpha and Black Forest Labs.Langdock is looking to capitalise on the fervour around ChatGPT and other LLMs while addressing employer concerns around data sharing and compliance when introducing AI chatbots into the workforce.Langdock has built what is essentially a model agnostic chatbot, which sits between the LLM and a business, that it says employers can roll out centrally, securely, and compliantly to its employees, saying it gives businesses “peace of mind”.Its tech, is says, basically addresses concerns a business might have when introducing ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini into the workforce.Schmidt, who along with his co-founders Jonas Beisswenger and Tobias Kemkes, attended Berlin startup university CODE, says: “We take away all the concerns about what happens to the data because we have essentially all the compliance in place for that in terms of contract work and providers we work with.”One potential benefit of Langdock, whose $3m seed fundraise last year was also backed by La Famiglia and Y Combinator, is that its clients, which include US pharma giant Merck and payment startup Mondu, are not tied to using one LLM for life, but can chop and change as they see fit.While it is relatively easy for individual users to swap models, it is harder for enterprises given compliance and regulatory challenges.Merck, for instance, uses Langdock as its AI base layer, which Merck calls MyGPT (with the Merck chatbot looking very similar to ChatGPT), which is rolled out to around 23,000 employees, about 45 per cent of its workforce.Langdock, which has 15 employees, has European and US clients, but Schmidt points out European firms have more regulatory and data concerns than US firms, given the relative tightness of the rules, along with concerns about data sharing

A startup based in Heidelberg, Germany, named Aleph Alpha, secured $500 million in Series B funding. Of this, €110 million was invested in the company's capital, while the remainder was allocated as research grants. The investment was led by prominent German business giants, including Schwarz Group, SAP, and Bosch Ventures. Despite this significant backing, Aleph Alpha struggled to maintain the pace set by its competitor, OpenAI.