Legora raises $550M to fuel U.S. expansion of AI agents that automate legal work – News

Legora AB, a Stockholm-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to automate legal work, said today it has raised a hefty $550 million late-atage funding round that brings its valuation to $5.55 billion.

Accel led the Series D round, which also saw the participation of existing backers such as Benchmark, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, ICONIQ, Redpoint Ventures and Y Combinator, plus new investors that included Alkeon Capital, Bain Capital, Firstmark Capital and Salesforce Ventures.

Legora uses a mixture of large language models, including Anthropic PBC’s Claude, to power a legion of AI agents designed to help legal workers. They’re designed to integrate with tools such as Microsoft Word, where they can analyze thousands of different legal documents, conduct research across databases, draft contracts and perform other tasks. The startup counts major law firms such as White & Case, Dentons and Linklaters as clients.

The round is the third major funding round raised by the company in the last 12 months. In October, it bagged $150 million in funding.

Chief Executive Max Junestrand told Bloomberg that the company hasn’t actually spent any of that money yet, but is stacking up its war chest in preparation for a massive expansion of its platform. “We’re expecting to significantly go up in our burn rate this year as we scale out the team in the U.S.,” he said.

The company set up its first U.S. office in New York City about a year ago, added a second in Denver, and is planning to open new locations in Chicago and Houston. According to Junestrand, Legora currently has about 800 customers across 50 markets.

The legal industry is one of the fastest-growing sectors for AI. Automated tools powered by LLMs promise to transform the industry, helping lawyers save hours of time that would otherwise be spent on grunt work such as reviewing documents and writing up contracts. In February, Anthropic made its own legal tech play when it launched a new plugin that enables Claude to automate legal work.

But Junestrand told Bloomberg that he doesn’t feel threatened by the company’s rivals, for business has been booming. Though he declined to provide numbers, he said its revenue has doubled every quarter since the last three months of 2024. “Over the past year, the pace of adoption in the U.S. has exceeded our expectations, as leading firms and in-house teams move decisively from experimentation to embedding AI across their organisations,” he added.

European AI startups have enjoyed a bumper week, funding-wise. On Monday, the U.K.-based AI infrastructure provider Nscale Global Holdings Ltd. closed on a massive $2 billion round. Today, former Meta Platforms Inc. AI chief Yann LeCun’s Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs announced it had raised $1 billion.

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