A trainee solicitor at A&O Shearman has sold his artificial intelligence startup to the media and technology giant Thomson Reuters.
Cambridge law graduate Alexander Kardos-Nyheim founded Safe Sign Technologies in January 2022, aided by by Cambridge law and AI professors and researchers. The UK-based business is developing legal-specific large language models (LLMs).
His team expanded in late 2023 with the arrival of Dr. Jonathan R. Schwarz, who became co-founder and chief scientist. Schwarz was formerly a senior research scientist at DeepMind.
Kardos-Nyheim and Schwarz said in a statement: ’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.’
Joel Hron, chief technology officer at Thomson Reuters, said: ’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.’
On his LinkedIn page Kardos-Nyheim said he is ‘over the moon’ to have completed the deal, the terms of which have not been disclosed.
Kardos-Nyheim’s other activities include leading digital campaigns for the Liberal Democrats. He is also a former Young Lord Mayor of the City of London. He attended City of London School and graduated from Cambridge in 2021.
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