Lawtech startup upgrades ‘sovereign legal AI’ amid ‘volatile’ geopolitics
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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.
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“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 startup said it hosts its models at data centres in Europe, owned by European cloud providers. It fully encrypts all user data and designs its AI models to be “fully compliant” with European data protection standards like GDPR from the outset.
Europe’s reliance on American AI and cloud infrastructure has come under increasing scrutiny in recent months, fuelled by increasing transatlantic tensions under President Trump. The volatility is driving consumers to look for more secure alternatives.
“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.”
Europe’s digital sovereignty will be a hot topic at TNW Conference, which takes place on June 19-20 in Amsterdam. Tickets for the event are now on sale — use the code TNWXMEDIA2025 at the check-out to get 30% off.
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