Thomson Reuters has swooped to acquire legal generative AI startup Safe Sign Technologies.
Safe Sign, based in Cambridge, counts experience from Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford, DeepMind and Lenovo among its founders.
Founded in February 2022 by tenured professors, AI scholars, lawyers, mathematicians, coders and business leaders, Safe Sign is building a proprietary large language model for the legal domain. It does not rely on external models.
Thomson Reuters, parent company of news agency Reuters, is described as a multinational information conglomerate.
“This acquisition marks another milestone on our journey to combine our trusted content and world-class domain experts with our cutting-edge technology,” said Joel Hron, its chief technology officer.
“Based on our internal assessment, we believe Safe Sign’s models have demonstrated industry-leading performance across a number of domain-specific evaluations. We believe that coupling them with our industry-leading content and expertise will help us deliver greater quality and performance from our AI solutions.
“We expect this acquisition to help accelerate our ability to provide our customers with a professional grade AI experience through the CoCounsel AI Assistant – the company’s genAI assistant – that enables professionals across industries to accelerate and streamline their workflows.”
The Safe Sign Technologies leadership team, consisting of Alexander Kardos-Nyheim and Dr Jonathan Schwarz, added: “We believe Safe Sign Technologies has been at the cutting edge of legal AI research since 2022, achieving significant progress in its goal to create the world’s best proprietary legal LLM.
“Safe Sign’s world-leading team – drawn from Cambridge, DeepMind, Harvard and MIT – is pleased to join with Thomson Reuters to become a major scientific and industrial disrupter in legal AI.”