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.”