Legal A.I. Start-Up Legora Raises $550 Million at an $8.8 Billion Valuation
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Seven months, the same amount, a much higher price: The Swedish legal A.I. start-up Legora has just closed a $550 million Series E funding round. That lifts its valuation from $5.6 billion to $8.8 billion. Among the customers of the A.I. operating system for lawyers is the Austrian construction group Strabag.
Atreides Leads, Fidelity and J.P. Morgan Join
The round is led by Atreides Management, Gavin Baker’s investment firm. New investors include Baron Capital, Fidelity Management & Research, Glade Brook Capital Partners and J.P. Morgan. Major existing investors are also participating, among them Accel, Benchmark, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, ICONIQ, Insight Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Capital Group and Sands Capital.
Only in March, Legora raised $550 million at a $5.55 billion valuation. The fresh capital will mainly fund expansion in North America, where Legora has offices in New York, Denver, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Toronto and Mexico City. It will also go toward growth in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region and toward new products for its Legora aOS platform, including tools for handling incoming requests, spotting regulatory changes early and conducting legal research.
From $1 Million to $200 Million in Revenue
The growth figures are striking. Legora says it grew its annual recurring revenue (A.R.R.) from $1 million to $100 million in less than 18 months, and took less than six months to add the next $100 million. A.R.R. now stands at more than $200 million. Legora was founded in Stockholm in 2023 and launched its platform in October 2024. Today, it employs more than 1,000 people in 18 locations.
More than 140,000 legal professionals at over 2,400 law firms and legal departments use the software in more than 80 markets. In the United States, now Legora’s largest market by revenue, more than half of the 50 largest law firms are customers. Corporate legal departments are becoming increasingly important, accounting for more than 40 percent of new customers in the third quarter. The potential in the legal market is enormous and the company is only getting started, said Max Junestrand, Legora’s chief executive and co-founder.
Strabag Doubles Its Licenses
One such corporate customer is Strabag. The construction group’s contract management and legal services unit, with about 400 employees in more than 25 countries, uses Legora for research, drafting contracts, translations and refining legal language, according to a Legora case study. The number of licenses is rising from 200 to 400 this year, giving the entire unit access. For data processing agreements, the team says it saves up to 80 percent of its time. “I want my people working on the real stuff,” said Volker Springer, Strabag’s general counsel.
Legora has also made its way into Austrian law firms. The Vienna-based commercial law firm Schönherr has been working with the start-up since the spring.
Neck and Neck With Harvey
Legora’s biggest rival is the U.S. start-up Harvey, and the race between the two is getting tighter. In September, Harvey also raised $550 million, but at a valuation of $15.5 billion. According to The Financial Times, Legora had been negotiating a valuation of at least $10 billion ahead of the round; it ended up at $8.8 billion.
Just how close the two have become was on display last week, when Legora and Harvey unveiled nearly identical products within a day of each other, under exactly the same name. Both are called Intake and are designed to serve as a central front door for legal requests in corporate legal departments, with an A.I. agent handling the groundwork. The overlap drew ridicule in the industry, but it shows what is at stake: Both companies want to push beyond big law firms into the legal departments of large corporations.
The two do not have the market to themselves. OpenAI works directly with the legal departments of large corporations, contract management software providers are building their own A.I. agents, and in the German-speaking world, start-ups such as Noxtua, in which legal publishers recently took a majority stake, are also in the mix.
