Legora: how a law-school dropout built a $5.6bn AI firm for lawyers

Legora, a Swedish startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyze legal documents, has reached a valuation of $5.6 billion (about 118 billion crowns) in just three years. The company was founded by 26-year-old Max Junestrand, a man who never studied law and came into the business from programming.

In March, Legora raised $550 million in a round led by the American fund Accel, and by April the sum had grown to $600 million (about 12.6 billion crowns). New investors include Nvidia’s venture arm and Australia’s Atlassian. The company is now discussing a fresh round at double its current valuation and is racing to catch up with its American rival Harvey.

Junestrand studied computer engineering at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm while also studying economics at the Stockholm School of Economics, but he never finished his thesis in his technical field. He wrote code — including statistical models for esports betting — then worked in investment funds and consulting, at McKinsey and Norrsken.

The idea for the company was born thanks to his volleyball partners, Sigge Labory and August Erséus, who were experimenting under the name Judilica with how AI could handle legal texts. The trigger was the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. “For our generation, that was a moment comparable to the arrival of the internet. I dropped out of school because the cost of building nothing had suddenly become too high,” Junestrand has said.

The team learned law “in the field” — writing letters and LinkedIn messages to practicing lawyers, inviting them to lunch and offering to pay their usual hourly rate just to have them explain the specifics of different legal fields. Many lawyers turned down the money and paid for lunch themselves instead. Today Junestrand sees this as proof of his core idea: what matters is not industry expertise but the willingness to learn fast. That stands in sharp contrast to the approach of its main rival, the American company Harvey, founded by former lawyer Winston Weinberg, who tried out ChatGPT right in the middle of his legal practice.

The team’s first attempt to get into Y Combinator — the world’s best-known startup accelerator, whose alumni include Airbnb, Stripe and Dropbox — failed: during the interview it emerged that Junestrand didn’t even know that lawyers specialize in different fields. But on the second attempt, in the winter of 2024, the startup — then still called Leya — was accepted. Back in the autumn of 2023, the major Swedish law firm Mannheimer Swartling had already added the product to its innovation programme, calling the platform “the most impressive thing we’ve seen.”

The company’s original slogan was deliberately simple: “We’re like ChatGPT, but compliant with European rules.” Yet that was enough in a market where law firms were wary of entrusting clients’ confidential documents to American chatbots — and it was precisely that wariness that opened the door to Legora’s rapid growth.