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

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 No. 1 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. Though 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 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.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told News that document processing has already been established as one of the best applications for AI, and believes it has even more potential in the legal industry.

“AI will not only augment the way lawyers work, but also change their work habits, allowing them to put their minds to work on higher-level problems,” Mueller said. “Noxtua is trying to differentiate itself from other legal AI startups with its strategic relationships, with C.H. Beck generally regarded as the gold standard for legal texts. But it faces a challenge in the shape of technophobia, as lawyers have proven to be highly resistant to technological change.”

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.

Photo: Noxtua