Founded in 2011 by Olivier Debeugny, a former executive at Société Générale, Lingua Custodia had made a name for itself in specialised machine translation for finance, with clients in Luxembourg, Paris and London. The company had developed engines capable of translating prospectuses, fund reports and regulatory documents with unrivalled accuracy in the financial sector. In 2019, it had opened an office in Luxembourg, strengthening its links with players in the local financial centre, particularly in asset management and fund services.
Now, under the Dragon LLM brand, the company is taking a major step forward. As the winner of the European Commission's Large AI Grand Challenge in 2024, it was able to train its new architecture on the Leonardo (Italy) and Jupiter (Germany) supercomputers, as part of the EuroHPC programme. Dragon aims to be a "frugal, sovereign and useful" AI, capable of running on conventional servers without relying on massive GPUs.
"Europe can innovate without copying the American or Chinese giants, and Dragon is proof of that," says Olivier Debeugny, founder and CEO. The company has not raised "any euros in capital" to lead this development, preferring to rely on European public power and an economical technical approach.
The Dragon technology reduces by a factor of three the computing power required for performance comparable to that of GPT or Llama models. The company also promises to halve energy consumption, a strong argument at a time when demand for European datacentres is exploding.
Dragon LLM has already published the code for its first version, Dragon-3B-Base-alpha, a model with 3.6 billion parameters, on Hugging Face. Commercial versions are expected in the next few months, with professional applications ranging from multilingual translation to document analysis and regulatory assistance.
With this announcement, the Versailles-based startup with historical roots in European finance is positioning itself as one of the few continental players to offer a credible and sober alternative to the dominant US models. Luxembourg, which was one of the first application areas for its financial technologies, could well once again become a strategic relay for this new European ambition.
