Swiss lab Giotto launches Alto and Solo reasoning models pitched as sovereign European AI

Giotto, an AI lab based in Lausanne, Switzerland, announced on 27 October 2026 a family of two reasoning models, Giotto Alto and Giotto Solo. The company presents them as "sovereign" AI for European governments, institutions and businesses that do not want to depend on infrastructure based in the United States.

Two models, three ways to deploy

Alto is the flagship, aimed at demanding reasoning and enterprise workloads. According to the press release, it runs on eight Nvidia B300 GPUs. Solo is the smaller member of the family and is built to run on a single GPU, which lets an organisation keep it on its own servers or on a workstation. Giotto calls Solo the most capable model that fits on one GPU, a claim it does not back with published figures.

The launch comes with a free anonymous chat that requires no account, plus mobile apps for iOS and Android. Customers can choose between three setups: a shared cloud hosted and operated in Europe, dedicated cloud instances in partner data centres in Switzerland or elsewhere in Europe, and on-premises installation through integrators, from a one-GPU machine for Solo to multi-GPU racks for Alto. The partners are not named.

Pricing differs by option. Access to the shared cloud is free, while its API is sold at a flat fee for unlimited requests limited to one at a time, with token packages for parallel requests. Dedicated instances are rented monthly, and on-premises licences are priced annually by the number and type of GPUs. Giotto describes its cloud services as aligned with the GDPR.

Background and open questions

The company was founded in 2017 by mathematics graduates of EPFL and is led by co-founder and CEO Aldo Podestà. It says it placed 11th and then 2nd among roughly 1,500 teams in the 2024 and 2025 ARC-AGI competitions, which test whether a system can infer new rules from a few examples. Startup Fortune reports that the company has raised about CHF 15 million since it was founded and lists Swiss insurer Groupe Mutuel and defence technology group RUAG among its partners.

The announcement leaves important points open. It gives no parameter counts, context lengths or results on standard benchmarks for either model, and does not say whether the weights will be released. Startup Fortune also notes that Giotto's terms of service bar publishing benchmarks of the model without prior written consent, which hampers independent comparison. For public-sector buyers, the sovereignty claims will ultimately rest on hosting and contract details that the release does not spell out.