Thomson Reuters today (21 August) announced it has acquired Safe Sign Technologies (SST), a UK-based startup that is developing legal-specific large language models (LLMs) and as of just eight months ago was operating in stealth mode.
SST was founded in February 2022 by CEO Alexander Kardos-Nyheim, a Cambridge law graduate and former trainee solicitor at A&O Shearman. In late 2023, Harvard University research fellow and former DeepMind senior research scientist Dr. Jonathan Richard Schwarz joined SST as co-founder and chief scientist.
“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, chief technology officer of Thomson Reuters. “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.”
He added: “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 team will report directly to Hron and will be working closely with the Thomson Reuters Labs team.
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