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The German legal AI company is deepening its ties with European publishers as it expands across the continent and takes on US competitors.
Noxtua has closed its Series C funding round totaling more than €100 million. Founded in Berlin in 2017 and spun out of research at Oxford University and Imperial College London, the scale-up launched its first version in 2024.
Since then, the legal AI company has grown continously and now has more than 30,000 users, around 100 employees, and six locations across Europe (Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, Zagreb, Munich, and Freiburg).
Its tech covers the entire legal-writing workflow, including research, analysis of complex legal issues, and document drafting. Its jurisdiction-specific Legal AI Workspaces are based on exclusive, curated legal data from leading European legal publishers (including C.H.BECK, MANZ, and Helbing Lichtenhahn.
Noxtua meets the professional, criminal, and data protection requirements specific to the legal profession (e.g. Section 203 of the German Criminal Code and Section 43e of the Federal Code for Lawyers) and holds certifications including BSI C5, ISO 27001, and ISO 42001.
The Series C also reshapes Noxtua’s investor base.
C.H.BECK, which invested in the company’s Series B in 2025, becomes the majority shareholder, while MANZ joins as a new investor. Existing investors Global Brain Corporation, KDDI Open Innovation Fund, CMS, Dentons, and Dominik Schiener, founder of the IOTA Foundation, are exiting as Noxtua shifts towards closer strategic partnerships with European legal publishers.
Technology and curated content partner for Europe’s Legal AI
C.H.BECK first invested in Noxtua’s Series B in 2025, which was, at the time, the largest funding round in Europe for Legal AI. That same year, the publisher and the AI company jointly launched the Beck-Noxtua Legal AI Workspace in Germany. C.H.BECK’s beck-online is the most extensive legal database in the German-speaking world and is widely used by legal professionals.
According to Prof. Dr Klaus Weber (member of the Executive Board at C.H.BECK):
“In all the investments the publishing house has done in the past, it has never been the tradition with our earlier, smaller investments to buy a company off the market or to merge it into the larger publishing house.
We’ve always allowed them to keep and grow their own identity, and that approach has proven successful. We plan to work very closely with Noxtua, even tying our product strategy to their platform. Therefore, it is in our own interest that Noxtua will be successful; and to become successful, Noxtua needs freedom and flexibility.”
Weber contends that the curated legal content is one of their most important assets as a publisher.
“With our legal database beck-online, we have the largest legal database in the German-speaking world containing more than 60 million legal documents.
We believe that we can make our content a success in the AI market with Noxtua’s technology. Therefore, we decided to link our product strategy very closely with Noxtua, and therefore, it was important for us to have a qualified majority.”
MANZ has also been collaborating with Noxtua since 2025 on the MANZ-Noxtua Legal AI Workspace, consciously pursuing a European approach: by partnering with Noxtua, it brings together specialised information from various publishers on a single platform.
Susanne Stein-Pressl, Managing Partner at MANZ, attributes Noxtua’s growth to its respect for the long legal legacy European publishing houses have built over decades, if not centuries.
“We appreciate that Noxtua doesn’t have this “move fast and break things” mentality but is interested in sustainable long-term success.”
€100M to accelerate European expansion
Noxtua founder and CEO Dr Leif-Nissen Lundbæk says the company has a clear goal of becoming the largest European Legal AI.
“I may be biased, but I have the impression that this is one of the industries that is adopting the AI revolution the fastest. We’ve seen this ourselves:
We’ve launched the first version of Noxtua about 2.5 years ago; in the past 12 months, we’ve quadrupled our team, and in the past four months, we’ve quintupled our revenue.
More than 30,000 legal professionals now use Noxtua. In the last four weeks alone, we’ve launched our Legal AI Workspace in partnership with leading local publishers in three countries: Poland, Sweden, and the Czech Republic.”
However, to keep up this pace, the company needs resources. This new investment will fund product development, the team, and its pan-European expansion and deepen its partnerships.
“Since the Series B in 2025, we saw how successful this combination of an agile, innovative AI startup and a family-owned publishing house with a tradition that spans centuries can be – and therefore, we decided together that we want to keep this spirit alive.
We are no longer dependent on the short-term VC race but can really focus on building a powerful Legal AI based on high-quality legal data.”
Legal AI based on exclusive curated legal data
In legal work, curated legal content is the basis for everything because, according to Lundbæk, almost good is not good enough for legal professionals.
“Continental Europe mostly has civil law systems. These rely heavily on commentary literature that is published by specialised legal publishers.
This data is what makes or breaks reliable Legal AI with substance. And that is why we base our entire system on high-quality legal data.”
Noxtua never relies entirely on LLMs, instead, it bases every single request, whether it’s a draft, a review, or research, on curated data from its publishing partners. According to Lundbæk, this distinguishes Noxtua from competitors that rely more heavily on LLMs.
Weber argues that accuracy alone is not enough in legal work. Legal professionals also need to understand how an AI system reached a particular conclusion.
“You can’t just say, ‘That’s what ChatGPT said.’
Noxtua provides this by putting a huge focus on sources, citations, and demonstrating how the AI arrived at a certain conclusion. Users always see all of the citations that refer to the curated legal data.”
Data protection, security, and privacy are equally important, particularly given the sensitivity of the information handled by lawyers, in-house counsel, and judges.
“Whenever a legal professional such as a lawyer, a company’s General Counsel, or a judge uses AI, they need to know that their data, their inputs, and outputs are safe. After all, legal data is some of the most sensitive data out there.”
Noxtua shares revenues with its publishing partners. It also created a special structure in which publishers provide the data the company uses to build its Legal AI Workspace, which they then sell. Lundbæk says the model is particularly attractive to smaller publishers in smaller markets because it lets them retain control over their content while becoming part of a wider European network.
“They know that we won’t just take their data and leave. And second, they become part of this larger publisher network that we’ve built.”
What legal professionals are handing over to AI
Legal professionals are increasingly delegating not only repetitive, time-consuming work to AI, but also more complex tasks. According to Lundbæk, Noxtua’s agentic AI can now run complex, multi-step analyses that would otherwise take hours. Legal research is another major use case.
“This brings us back to the curated data. We can offer deep legal research because we have access to the curated, high-quality data that leading European publishers have compiled over decades and even centuries. That truly is an immense USP.”
However, Lundbæk sees a clear limit when it comes to human oversight and responsibility:
“Taking on responsibility is still something that AI is, and probably won’t be able to do. AI can help immensely in preparing drafts and in managing complex matters, but our legal systems are designed in such a way (and rightly so) that a human needs to take on responsibility for decisions.”
Less Hollywood, more substance
US Legal AI companies are raising significant amounts of capital, but Noxtua is betting that access to European legal content, combined with its approach to models, infrastructure, security, and sovereignty, can create a defensible European competitor. Lundbæk contends:
“We have a saying here at Noxtua: ‘Less Hollywood, more substance’. We focus at Noxtua on the substance, in terms of security, in terms of data, in terms of our clients’ needs.”
He notes that while some competitors are raising huge amounts of capital, they are also spending heavily on activities that don’t necessarily make the product itself better. Instead, Noxtua is focusing on data, models, infrastructure, security, and sovereignty.
On the data side, the company has access to curated legal content through its publishing partners. On the model side, it uses high-performance open-source models and is also introducing access to closed-source frontier models in a European setup with Deutsche Telekom.
According to Lundbæk, Noxtua’s ability to host its technology on infrastructure set up with European partners also enables it to deploy its solution directly to the judiciary, an important customer group for the company.
Looking ahead, Lundbæk sees two major trends shaping Legal AI over the next three years.
The first is a shift towards Legal AI becoming an operating system that brings together the tools legal professionals use throughout their working day.
The second is a changing competitive landscape. Lundbæk sees three main groups emerging: international Legal AI platforms such as Harvey and Legora offering globally standardised products; general-purpose model providers such as Claude moving into specialised legal applications; and platforms such as Noxtua that focus more deeply on individual jurisdictions using curated legal data.
He sees general-purpose AI providers becoming increasingly important competitors as large law firms begin adopting their products directly.
“In my opinion, providers that don’t delve deeply into specific jurisdictions will eventually be squeezed between general-purpose providers and those that do.”
Legal AI and the rule of law
Lundbæk connects Noxtua’s European focus to a broader responsibility for how AI is deployed within the legal system:
“Noxtua was founded almost ten years ago out of my PhD thesis at Oxford University that focused on privacy-protecting AI. A lot has changed since then, but what hasn’t changed is our deep conviction that we need powerful AI based on European values.
With Noxtua, we’re trying to see Legal AI not only as a tool that saves legal professionals time, but also as a responsibility to the rule of law.”
Weber asserts that legal AI has the potential to become a true game changer, not only for legal professionals but also for democracies.
“If deployed responsibly, it can help restore trust in public institutions.
Currently, many countries face the challenge that court proceedings and legal matters are excessively time-consuming, which diminishes public confidence in the state’s ability to function effectively. Legal AI that helps the judiciary work smarter and more efficiently can help to fill in this gap.”