C.H.BECK takes majority stake in legal AI company Noxtua

C.H.BECK, one of Germany's leading legal publishers, has taken a majority stake in Noxtua, a legal AI company founded in Berlin. Noxtua announced on September 23 that it had closed a Series C round totaling more than €100 million, with C.H.BECK becoming its new majority shareholder. Austrian legal publisher MANZ joined as a new minority investor. According to Noxtua, the deal is the largest investment in the history of C.H.BECK, founded in 1763 and now more than 260 years old.

The shareholder base has changed significantly. Existing investors Global Brain Corporation, KDDI Open Innovation Fund, law firms CMS and Dentons, and IOTA Foundation founder Dominik Schiener are exiting. The company said they are making room to align with its deepened content- and strategy-focused direction. CMS and Dentons will continue working with Noxtua as key anchor clients, and CMS co-initiated Noxtua in 2024.

The relationship between the two companies began about a year and a half ago. On April 23, 2025, Xayn AG, Noxtua's predecessor, closed an €80.7 million Series B led by C.H.BECK, which at the time was the largest funding round in Europe for legal AI. The same announcement said the company would be renamed Noxtua SE, and that year the two companies jointly launched the Beck-Noxtua Legal AI Workspace in Germany.

C.H.BECK's key asset is its database. According to the press release, C.H.BECK's beck-online is the most extensive legal database in the German-speaking world, with more than 60 million documents covering all relevant areas of law and the most comprehensive collection of legal commentaries. The April 2025 Series B press release METAL reviewed put the same database at more than 55 million documents. Prof. Dr. Klaus Weber, member of the Executive Board at C.H.BECK, said that "combining high-quality data with innovative AI technology is the recipe for success in a rapidly changing market," adding that the publisher is proud to be the majority shareholder.

Weber also explained the size of the stake. According to reports, he said: "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." He added that the publisher has never bought companies off the market or merged them into the house in its past investments, and that Noxtua needs to keep its identity and flexibility to succeed.

Noxtua was founded in 2017 on research by Leif-Nissen Lundbæk and Professor Michael Huth at Oxford University and Imperial College London. Its first product launched in 2024, and it now has more than 30,000 users, around 100 employees, and six locations: Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, Zagreb, Munich, and Fribourg. It covers the full legal writing workflow, from research and analysis of complex legal issues to document drafting, and its country-specific workspaces run on exclusive data from European publishers including C.H.BECK, MANZ, Helbing Lichtenhahn, Blendow Group, and Ciela Norma.

The company also disclosed its growth pace. According to reports, Lundbæk said the team had quadrupled over the past 12 months and revenue had quintupled over the past four months, and that in the last four weeks Noxtua had launched workspaces with local publishers in Poland, Sweden, and the Czech Republic. Absolute revenue figures were not disclosed. In the press release, Lundbæk said the company has "already built, among other things, Europe's largest legal database and Europe's largest network of independent legal publishers," calling the joint investment by the two publishers a strong signal to the market.

Through a content marketer's lens, the protagonist of this deal is not the model but the manuscript. According to reports, Lundbæk said continental Europe mostly has civil law systems that rely heavily on commentary literature from specialized publishers, and that this data makes or breaks reliable legal AI. Noxtua grounds every request, whether a draft, a review, or research, in publisher data, shares revenue with its publishing partners, and has built a structure in which publishers supply the data and then sell the finished workspace themselves. It is a design in which the content owner also controls the distribution channel.

What publishers want is trust rather than speed. Mag. Susanne Stein-Pressl, Managing Partner at MANZ, said in the press release that "as a publisher, we also guarantee that the quality of legal content is maintained, even and especially in the age of AI." Founded in Vienna in 1849, MANZ launched the first legal database, RDB, in 1986 and has worked with Noxtua on the MANZ-Noxtua workspace since 2025. According to reports, Weber said legal professionals need to understand how an AI reached its conclusion: "You can't just say, 'That's what ChatGPT said.'"

The competitive landscape is also taking shape. According to reports, Lundbæk expects the legal AI market to split into three groups: global standardized platforms such as Harvey and Legora, general-purpose model providers such as Claude moving into legal work, and platforms like Noxtua that go deep on individual jurisdictions. Providers that do not go deep into specific jurisdictions, he predicted, will be squeezed between general-purpose providers and specialized local platforms. METAL has reported that Google launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal for legal work, and the entry of general-purpose model providers into the legal market is already a reality.

Noxtua is also seeking to differentiate through its model choices. According to reports, the company uses high-performance open-source models while introducing access to closed-source frontier models in a European setup with Deutsche Telekom, and Lundbæk said infrastructure built with European partners allows it to deploy directly to the judiciary. The company said it meets the professional secrecy requirements of Section 203 of the German Criminal Code and Section 43e of the Federal Code for Lawyers and holds BSI C5, ISO 27001, and ISO 42001 certifications.

The Noxtua press release METAL reviewed does not state C.H.BECK's exact ownership percentage or the valuation assigned in the deal. Because five existing investors exited in the round, it has also not been disclosed how much of the more than €100 million went to the company as new capital. The company said the investment supports product development and pan-European expansion.

The signal this deal sends to the legal AI market is clear. Instead of a venture-funded race for speed, a path has opened for a family-owned publisher that holds the content to become the majority owner of an AI company, and according to reports, Lundbæk said: "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." Whether the choice proves right will depend on whether C.H.BECK's commentaries and MANZ's databases carry the same weight in new markets such as Poland, Sweden, and the Czech Republic, and whether local content becomes a moat when general-purpose model providers go directly after large law firms.