Lingua Custodia wins the Large AI Grand Challenge Award organised by the European Commission!

AI award

Lingua Custodia wins the Large AI Grand Challenge

The French Fintech company Lingua Custodia, a specialist in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applied to Finance since 2011, was delighted to receive an award in Brussels yesterday. This award, which was presented by EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, is designed to reward innovative start-ups and SMEs for devising ambitious strategies and making commitments to develop large-scale AI foundation models that will provide a competitive edge for Europe.

Together with 3 other technology SMEs, Lingua Custodia will share a prize of a total of €1 million and access to two of Europe’s world-leading supercomputers, LUMI and LEONARDO for 8 million hours. This challenge was highly competitive and received 94 proposals.

Lingua Custodia’s AI foundation models

Lingua Custodia’s winning proposal focused on developing a series of AI foundation models with 3 major objectives, using the company’s existing skills and known expertise in the AI arena:

  • Build very cost effective, fast and efficient models to run on smaller servers and democratize the technology while reducing energy consumption
  • Ensure the models can handle multilingual queries and make them available to non-English speakers
  • Tune the models for the retrieval of information (RAG) to enhance the usage of generative AI for multilingual knowledge management.
Lingua Custodia’s focus on cost and energy efficient AI foundation models


Olivier Debeugny, CEO of Lingua Custodia, declared to Thierry Breton: “Lingua Custodia is an AI company, that has raised a modest amount of capital since its launch. This has been a catalyst for our creativity and resourcefulness and we therefore have the skills to optimize everything we develop. This is why we have been working on the design of multilingual, extremely cost and energy efficient models to be applied to an AI use case with a high Return on Investment.”

A propos de Lingua Custodia

Lingua Custodia is a Fintech company leader in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Finance. It was created in 2011 by finance professionals to initially offer specialised machine translation.

Leveraging its state-of-the-art NLP expertise, the company now offers a growing range of applications: Speech-to-Text automation, Linguistic data extraction from unstructured documents, etc.. and achieves superior quality thanks to highly domain-focused machine learning algorithms.

Its cutting-edge technology has been regularly rewarded and recognised by both the industry and clients: Investment houses, global investment banks, private banks, financial divisions within major corporations and service providers for financial institutions.

Size no longer matters for large language models!

Lingua Custodia’s new compact open source language model Fin-Pythia-1.4B outperforms larger language models.

The French Fintech company Lingua Custodia, a specialist in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applied to Finance since 2011, releases its first open source language model on the Hugging Face Hub specifically trained for sentiment analysis of financial text.

Fin-Pythia-1.4B is a language model that’s been fine-tuned on financial documents and instructions. It can understand complex financial jargon and terminology. It is compact in size, which makes it fast to run without compromising the quality of the output.

Lingua Custodia’s open source language model is extremely accurate in analyzing financial sentiment and outperforms well-known models like GPT-4 and BloombergGPT. 

Raheel Qader, The head of Lingua Custodia’s Research and Development lab highlights “to produce accurate language models, the essential bases are data, expertise and experience.  Following 4 months of research, we were delighted to find that our open source language model outperformed both GPT-4 and and BloombergGPT in various financial NLP tasks.  This demonstrates clearly that size is not necessary to create powerful models and I am delighted that the research team here at Lingua Custodia was able to bring the model to the open source community so rapidly.  This places Lingua Custodia firmly at the forefront of generative ai technologies“

Fin-Pythia-1.4B model card is available at this link

https://huggingface.co/LinguaCustodia/fin-pythia-1.4b

Lingua Custodia will be releasing a series of other large language models targeting various financial document processing use cases as part of its research and development strategy for 2024.

Lingua Custodia proves conclusively that it is possible to develop cutting edge generative AI tools without a 10M€+ investment!

The French Fintech company Lingua Custodia, a specialist in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applied to Finance since 2011, releases its new Document Analyser, a generative AI tool allowing its 10,000+ financial users to easily and securely answer due diligence questionnaires and find information in large volumes of documentation.


With one click and the input of questions, the users of Verto, Lingua Custodia’s secure document processing platform, can now retrieve information in multiple languages from vast amounts of data. The aim of the document analyser is to meet the business case for speed and accuracy in responding to regulatory, client and investment queries.


The Lingua Custodia team of research scientists and engineers had been working on the product design for the Document Analyser tool for over a year to propose this secure solution hosted in the EU on secure and segregated GPU servers.


Olivier Debeugny CEO of Lingua Custodia declared : “Generative AI tools are hot topics at the moment for funding rounds, I however firmly believe that innovative document processing technologies can be produced without large investment, provided you have a lot of data, experience and a skilled team! Lingua Custodia has been at the forefront of language technologies since its creation in 2011 and we believe the Document Analyser will empower our clients, improving operational efficiency, and enhancing their decision-making processes.”


The Document Analyser is available on Lingua Custodia’s financial document processing secure platform, together with its translation, transcription and other data extraction AI tools.