When I started Legora with my co-founders, we made a rule: every new customer had to make the company stronger. It goes back to our partnership with Mannheimer Swartling, one of the largest firms in the Nordics, and our first big customer. We built the product alongside their lawyers, setting up Legora's first office in one of their conference rooms, and we have built it with our customers ever since.
Three years on we have more than 2,400 customers, and the rule hasn’t changed. Each one made the product better and the economics healthier. That way of working is the main reason we’ve come this far, and a large part of why we can announce a $550 million Series E this week, at an $8.8 billion post-money valuation, led by Atreides Management.
Here is how we got here.
Who we raised from
New investors include Baron Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Glade Brook Capital Partners, and J.P Morgan. We built this round around those who plan to be with us for the long-game, and every major existing investor, the ones who’ve seen us up close, chose to back us again.
We raised with significant cash still in the bank. Our growth doesn’t depend on outside capital, but this round lets us go faster.
How we run Legora
We build on the best frontier models, and don’t train our own general legal model. That was a real debate when we started in 2023. The models were new, and plenty of people said the way to win in legal AI was to fine-tune your own. We didn’t have the money for it, and fine-tuning didn’t seem to work at our scale. Training a new generation of model costs billions, and most of what lawyers needed wasn’t in the model anyway. It was in everything around it: security, privacy, parsing, working with large sets of documents. So we bet on every frontier model and put our effort into making them work for lawyers. Since then a better, cheaper model has arrived every few months. We build boats, not houses: when the models rise, everything we’ve built floats higher. Legora routes each task to the model that does it best, and we only post-train for narrow jobs where frontier models fall short.
That bet also made us efficient. We invested early in model routing and benchmarking. Every new model goes through our own evaluations before it touches customer work, so we know exactly where it’s strong, and each task goes to the model that does it best. Customers get better performance at lower cost, and Legora has always run at a positive gross margin, one that keeps improving.
We build Legora together with our customers, and we wanted our pricing to reflect that. We get paid when customers get value. We were the first large legal AI company to offer consumption-based pricing, so what a customer pays rises and falls with the work Legora does for them. We only grow with a customer when Legora is earning its place, which keeps our interests pointed the same way. It’s the rule we started with, written into how we charge.
To keep earning that place, we do more than ship software. Building technology is hard. Changing how a law firm works is harder. So when we launched, we didn’t hand lawyers a product and wish them luck. We had former lawyers ready to sit with them and show how it fit their practice area. We call them legal engineers. We now employ more than 150, and they work inside customer teams on their hardest matters.
One of them once flew from New York to Stockholm on a Saturday and spent a week and a half with our engineers. A large US firm wanted to switch to us, but needed one specific task solved, and we couldn’t do it yet. He built it. That is what we mean by partner. We now have more lawyers than software engineers. And daily active users now spend more than two hours a day on Legora.
We started in Stockholm, where the whole Swedish legal market is smaller than one of the big New York firms, so the world was always our market. The US is now our largest market by revenue, and more than half of the AmLaw 50 are customers. We’re expanding globally across 18 offices.
Yet, every new hire still onboards in Stockholm. In 2024, onboarding meant finding me and buying a laptop. Now it’s five days on the product and how we work, and everyone leaves able to demo Legora. It keeps one culture across every office. We’re a team of missionaries. People join for the mission and stay for the long run, and a company built for the long-term needs exactly that.
The hard choices
Early on, we didn’t sell Legora until we knew lawyers could rely on it, even though we could have started sooner. We chose to build on other people’s models rather than our own, and decided to charge in a way that only pays off if customers keep getting value. We win on the product and the service, so we don’t chase lower prices to close a deal. These are the right trades for a company built to last.
They have paid off. We went from $1 million to $100 million in ARR in 18 months, faster than any other enterprise software company selling through a direct sales team. The next $100 million took less than six months. We’d make the same trades again.
What the money builds
Legal work is roughly a trillion-dollar industry, and still today only about 4% of it goes on software. Agents can change that, and getting them into lawyers’ hands is half the job. We meet lawyers where they already work, in Microsoft Word or in person at their offices. That’s why we’re raising: to build the system every serious legal team in the world runs its work on, and to put it in front of all of them.
That system is the Legora aOS, our agentic operating system for legal work. A law firm already runs on one: its playbooks, how juniors are trained, who signs off on what. The trouble is that it lives in people’s heads and across too many disconnected tools, so every piece of work depends on someone coordinating it by hand. The aOS brings it into one system that sits between the models and the firm. Agents can take a whole task from start to finish, such as diligence on a deal or discovery in a dispute. Lawyers step in where judgment is needed.
Much of the round goes into making that system deeper. To do legal work well, an agent has to know which laws and cases apply and how they fit together. It also has to know how each firm works: its precedent, its matters, how it likes things done. What a firm teaches the system stays the firm’s. The models underneath will keep changing, and the aOS is built so that each new one makes it better.
Where we go from here
Legal has always had more work than lawyers to do it. AI hasn’t changed that. In fact, I’m convinced that AI will grow the pie. If you could review every contract, you would. Many of the firms we work with are hiring more lawyers, because there’s more work to go around. And our users tell us they love being a lawyer again. Some say they would never have left the profession if they’d had this technology when they practiced.
I think we’ve only built about 1% of the software Legora will ever build. The rest we’ll build the way we started, together with our customers, and we plan to keep doing it for decades.
Thank you to our customers for building Legora with us, to our team, and to our investors, old and new. This is the most exciting time in history to be a lawyer, and I’m glad we get to be in the middle of it.
