Most startup founders chase revenue charts, headline funding rounds and polished stage presentations. Alexander Kardos-Nyheim took a different route. While training as a solicitor at Allen & Overy, he built Safe Sign Technologies, a legal-specific large language model (LLM) startup designed to make artificial intelligence more reliable for legal work. Roughly two and a half years after its founding, Thomson Reuters acquired the company before it had generated revenue from subscriptions. The acquisition, announced on 21 August 2024, demonstrated how specialised research and technical expertise can create value before a business has paying customers. The story raises a question every founder, investor and legal professional should consider, what truly makes a young company valuable? From a teenage planning dispute to an unusual acquisition, Kardos-Nyheim’s journey offers a closer look at the changing economics of artificial intelligence.
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