Noxtua raises $92 million for sovereign AI tailored to German legal system
Returning to 2020, behind It was a privacy-based on-device AI startup designed specifically for smartphones. However, that early experience ultimately pivoted the company to develop sovereign AI for its legal realm. Currently, Xayn has been rebranded as Noxtua, bringing together a $92.2 million (approximately 81.2 million euros) Series B round.
The round was led by strategic investor Ch Beck, a leading German legal publisher. For context, Ch Beck effectively owns a repository of all legal cases and judgments in Germany, giving him a unique position. The idea is that Noxtua will have access to the entire archives and legal newswire for its new legal AI products. Beck-noxtua.
Additional new investors on board include CMS, Germany’s largest business law firm, and Northern Data Group, the high-performance computing specialist from the global law firm Dentons. Previous and existing investors include Global Brain, KDDI Open Innovation Fund and Dominik Schiener.
The addition of data in the North is no coincidence. Beck-Noxtua operates as sovereign AI in the company’s cloud infrastructure contained within Germany.
Noxtua argues that highly specialized AI can investigate legal issues, analyze and draft legal documents. All of these are legally compliant with customers, including German-based customers. This is important. This is because German legal compliance standards are very high and Ch Beck’s training data is absolutely important for accuracy. It contains 55 million documents. This is the largest legal database in the world that speaks German.
As Geopolitics casts a shadow over the idea of running a German-based AI model on US infrastructure, Noxtua has inked its hosting partnership with Frankfurt-based Northern Data.
Dr. Leif-Nissen Lundbæk, CEO and co-founder of Noxtua, told TechCrunch in a call that Noxtua uses its own version of the Transformer AI model, but one person has specifically trained them on legal contracts. “We’ve already expanded to many law firms and legal departments and partnered with Ch Beck,” he said.
Lundbæk said Noxtua must take this route, as the US-based basic model is based on American data, partly UK data and contracts.
“This is very different in countries like Germany and France,” he added. “These models really fail accurately. What’s more, government services are inherently legal. That’s why we can’t use American AI models in the German legal context.”
Noxtua’s technology was developed from research carried out by the founders of Oxford University and Imperial College London, and later developed at CMS.
In a statement, Professor Klaus Weber, a member of Ch Beck’s executive committee, said, “The vision of Noxture, European legal AI, will hold hands and coordinate with our values.