Swedish AI legal assistant startup Legora has raised an $80m Series B at a $675m valuation. The round was led by Iconiq and General Catalyst alongside existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Benchmark, and YCombinator.
Demand for AI solutions in the legal profession is on the rise, with business intelligence firm Marketsandmarkets predicting the sector’s global market value will more than triple from around $3bn in 2025 to almost $11bn in 2030.
Legora (previously Leya) was founded two years ago by CEO Max Junestrand and CTO Sigge Labor and now employs 100 people across offices in Stockholm, London and New York.
The company has developed a collaborative AI platform built on top of large language models to help lawyers in their day-to-day work, such as researching, reviewing or drafting legal documents. It currently works with lawyers across 250 firms and legal teams in 20 markets.
Speaking to Sifted while en route to San Francisco (before travelling to India to onboard a “large customer”), Junestrand says Legora wasn’t actively fundraising but chose to take the money investors offered rather than to wait.
“It’s not free to expand and chase every opportunity,” he says. “Better to raise money before the bank account hits zero.”
From 500 legal assistants to a handful
In 2023, Legora was one of the participants in Y Combinator’s accelerator program and, at the time, wasn’t the only company with a similar idea.
Legal tech has been hot among investors — last year VCs like Benchmark, Index Ventures, Plural, Episode 1, Google Ventures and General Catalyst all wrote cheques for European legaltechs.
UK-based Luminance is the best funded AI legal startup with a $75m Series C three months ago and total funding of $165m. Legora, which raised a $25m Series A less than one year ago, has still some way to go with a total of $120m in funding. But Junestrand is not worried about the competition.
“It felt like 500 AI legal assistants were launched at the same time we started. But now there are only us and a few others left, I guess we managed to put a lid on the market — there are pretty significant scale advantages,” Junestrand says.
While some of Legora’s competitors focused on point solutions, Junestrand thinks Legora’s broader take has proven to be a better solution.
“A point solution might carve out a specific thing regarding M&A, like a part of due diligence, for example. My take is that the real opportunity in the AI agent space lies in agents that can use these point solutions to do more — like searching a database, calling on a translator or handling e-signatures,” he says.
Junestrand brings up Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) which came out late last year and provides a model-agnostic interface that allows AI assistants to interact with various tools, services and datasets.
‘It takes a sense of urgency’
“We have a great momentum right now and with infinite demand, much to do with the way we have worked strategically with our customers that puts us way ahead of the competition,” he says.
Legora has grown fast — the company only had 15 people one year ago.
“We have gone from a late stage startup to a global force in less than one year, it is hard to imagine,” he says.
“From the start, we have said we wanted to build a global category leader in this space and to do that takes a sense of urgency – it is an insane amount of work and it attracts a certain type of person. From my perspective, building our team has been both the most challenging and rewarding,” he says.
Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, managing director at General Catalyst, and Seth Pierrepont, general partner at Iconiq, are both joining the board of directors. Legora’s clients include leading law firms Cleary Gottlieb, Goodwin, Mannheimer Swartling and Bird&Bird.
“Legora is driving AI transformations in a highly specialised industry,” zu Fürstenberg said in a statement.
“With an outstanding product, rapid adoption by top-tier firms and a founder who combines rare product instinct with exceptional execution, as we see it, Legora is redefining how legal work gets done.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/general-catalyst-and-iconiq-back-ai-legal-startup-legora-in-80m-series-b/
