Noxtua Secures €80.7M for Sovereign Legal AI Tailored to European Law

Noxtua raises $92M for its sovereign AI tuned for the German legal system | TechCrunch

Back in 2020, Xayn was a privacy-based, on-device AI startup designed specifically for smartphones. But that early experience eventually saw the company pivot into developing sovereign AI for the legal sphere. Now Xayn has rebranded as Noxtua and raised a $92.2 million (roughly €81.2 million) Series B round. The round was led by strategic investor C.H. Beck, Germany's leading legal publisher. For context, C.H. Beck effectively owns the repository of all legal cases and judgments in Germany, giving it a unique position. The idea is that Noxtua will have access to its entire archive and legal news wire for its new legal AI product dubbed Beck-Noxtua. Additional new investors on board include high-performance computing specialist Northern Data Group, Germany's largest business law firm CMS, and global law firm Dentons. Previous and existing investors include Global Brain, KDDI Open Innovation Fund, and Dominik Schiener. The addition of Northern Data is no coincidence. Beck-Noxtua will run as a sovereign AI on that company's cloud infrastructure, which is contained within Germany. Noxtua claims its highly specialized AI can research legal matters and analyze and draft legal documents, all in a legally compliant manner for customers including those based in Germany. This is important because the bar for legal compliance in Germany is extremely high, making the training data from C.H. Beck absolutely crucial for accuracy. It includes 55 million documents -- the largest legal database in the German-speaking world. With geopolitics casting a shadow over the idea of running Germany-based AI models on U.S.-based infrastructure, Noxtua inked the hosting partnership with Northern Data, which is based in Frankfurt. Dr. Leif-Nissen Lundbæk, CEO and Co-Founder of Noxtua, told TechCrunch over a call that Noxtua uses its own version of a transformer AI model, but one trained specifically on legal contracts. "We've already rolled it out to a lot of law firms and legal departments and partnered with C.H. Beck," he said, "[which is] effectively the 'Thompson Reuters for law' in Germany." Lundbæk said Noxtua had to take this route as U.S.-based foundational models are based on American data, partially also U.K. data, and contracts. "This is very different in countries like Germany or France," he added. "Those models really fail in precision. Plus, government services are essentially legal, right? So you cannot just use an American AI model in a German legal context." Noxtua's technology was developed out of research undertaken by the founders at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London, and later developed with CMS. In a statement, Professor Dr. Klaus Weber, member of the executive board at C.H. Beck, said, "Noxtua's vision of a sovereign European legal AI aligns hand in hand with our values ... Noxtua is a cornerstone of our innovation strategy."

Lawtech startup upgrades 'sovereign legal AI' amid 'volatile' geopolitics

The German company said digital sovereignty has become increasingly important Berlin-based startup Xayn has rebranded itself after its flagship product, "Noxtua" -- a "sovereign European legal AI" aimed at law professionals. Alongside its new name, Noxtua has secured €80.7mn in funding to refine its AI models and expand to new markets. The lead investor in the round was C.H.Beck, one of Germany's oldest publishing houses. Noxtua will use the firm's database of over 55 million law-related documents to train a new AI model called Beck-Noxtua. Beck-Noxtua will join Noxtua's suite of AI models, which work a bit like ChatGPT. However, unlike more general-purpose chatbots, all of the company's models are trained on "exclusive high-quality legal data sets selected and meticulously labelled by legal experts," its CEO and co-founder, Dr. Leif-Nissen Lundbæk, told TNW. "Noxtua has a deep understanding of the nuanced differences between various legal definitions," Lundbæk said. Law professionals use the tool to conduct legal research as well as analyse, review, summarise, translate, and draft legal documents. It's available in several languages, but focuses on German and English. European 'sovereign AI' Noxtua -- then Xayn -- first launched in 2017. Lundbæk and fellow co-founder Professor Michael Huth spun out the company from research on privacy-first AI solutions at Oxford University and Imperial College London. Noxtua's first product was a data privacy-focused mobile search engine. But it later pivoted to fully focus on legal AI, following the launch of its first model last year in collaboration with CMS, Germany's largest business law firm. Noxtua bills itself as "Europe's secure and sovereign legal AI." "The geopolitical situation has become highly volatile, with historical certainties being questioned," said Lundbæk. "During these times, independence, sovereignty, and autonomy become ever more important."

Legal AI tech startup Noxtua raises €80.7M to help European lawyers automate their work - SiliconANGLE

Legal AI tech startup Noxtua raises €80.7M to help European lawyers automate their work Germany-based legal technology startup Noxtua SE said today it has closed on an €80.7 million ($91.6 million) round of funding after undergoing a corporate rebranding. The company, which was previously known as Xayn SE, said today's round was led by Verlag C. H. BECK oHG, the number one publisher of legal books in Germany. It was joined by a host of strategic backers, including Northern Data AG, a provider of cloud-based computing infrastructure, and CMS LTF Limited, one of Europe's leading business law practices. The global law firm Dentons Corp. joined the round as a new investor, and existing backers Global Brain Corp. and KDDI Open Innovation Fund also participated. Noxtua said the funds will enable it to bring its upcoming integrated Legal AI workspace, called Beck-Noxtua, into general availability later this year, and it's inviting interested customers to sign up to a waitlist from today. Beck-Noxtua is an artificial intelligence platform for law firms that has been trained on massive volumes of legal data from C.H. Beck. It provides access to two specialized large language models for legal practitioners, including the Noxtua Legal Large Language Model and Noxtua Voyage Embed. The startup, which began life as a joint project at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London, says the Beck-Noxtua platform will transform legal work, helping lawyers and other experts in their research and analysis and in drafting legal documents in a way that's fully compliant. The Noxtua Legal LLM was trained on C.H. Beck's "beck-online" dataset, which contains more than 55 million documents covering almost every aspect of European law. It encompasses one of the world's most comprehensive collections of commentary literature, which Noxtua says is essential for lawyers in their day-to-day work. With a capacity of up to 256,000 tokens and more than 11 billion parameters, Noxtua Legal LLM is designed to parse and analyze lengthy legal documents, summarize them and surface insights. It can also draw up complex legal texts entirely from scratch, and the company says it's compliant with Europe's General Data Protection Regulation. Meanwhile, Noxtua Voyage Embed is a fine-tuned legal search embedding model that specializes in European and German law, and it's primarily designed to help lawyers find relevant texts and search for precedents in legal cases. One thing that stands out from Noxtua's funding round is the unusually strategic nature of its primary backers. While C.H. Beck is the primary supplier of legal data for training its models, Northern Data will ensure they play nicely with Europe's strict data sovereignty laws. According to Noxtua co-founder and Chief Executive Leif-Nissen Lundbæk (pictured, second from the right), European digital sovereignty is not merely a political question, but one that "must also be addressed with hard technical facts". That's because Europe has established one of the world's most regulated data security regimes, and requires that European companies host their models and store their information within the European Union. Northern Data, with data centers in Frankfurt and other European countries, is therefore the ideal infrastructure partner for Noxtua. As for CMS and Dentons, they'll be contributing their comprehensive juristic know-how and legal research expertise, and will help Noxtua to develop additional products specialized in the laws of Germany and other European nations. "We are bringing together a unique combination of AI, legal, and computing expertise," Lundbæk added. Noxtua said it will follow up its rebrand by establishing new offices in other European countries besides Germany, as part of its mission to become Europe's top legal AI company.