Ep 82: Behind Legora's $550M Raise, Model Competition, Doubling Revenue Every Quarter, & US Expansion

**Jacob Effron** (0:00)
Legora has been one of the fastest growing companies in AI these past years. Since we partnered with them since the Series A, it's just been absolutely insane to watch the pace this team moves at. The product improvements, the growth, really just such an impressive company. And today on Unsupervised Learning, we had Max Jungestål, the CEO of Legora, on to share some exciting news. Their $550 million Series D, led by Excel at an over $5.5 billion valuation. And my colleague Logan and I had a lot of fun sitting down with Max and talking about a bunch of things. We hit on competition from the foundation models and how he thinks about what Anthropic will and won't do. We talked about some of these AI enabled services, like an AI enabled law firm, and what he thinks about those business models. We talked about what it's like building an AI company, and how that's different from traditional SaaS companies. And we talked about how he gets his team AI first, and some of the changes they've made there. Max is just blown me away these past years with how fast this company's moods and how impressive he is. And I think folks that will really see that in this episode. And so I really encourage you to listen. Without further ado, here's Max. So Max, I think it's been, what, 10 months since your last podcast appearance here?

**Max Jungestål** (1:03)
Yeah, something like that. And a new couch.

**Jacob Effron** (1:05)
Yeah, we had a new set up here. And I know 10 months is like an infinite number of years in the Lora time. I think you've had some pretty big news since then, and some big news to share today.

**Max Jungestål** (1:15)
We have. We just signed a Series D. I booked my flights home from San Francisco at 12 p.m. on the Friday and I told David, our CFO, that I'm going to sign the term sheet before I get on this plane. And I got it Thursday 2 a.m. checked by Legora, checked by the lawyers, signed it and got on the flight.

**Jacob Effron** (1:36)
Get us up to speed on kind of the round where the business is today.

**Max Jungestål** (1:40)
Yeah. I mean, look, the last 10 months have been anything, nothing short of astronomical. Basically, since October in 2024, we've doubled the business every single quarter. And we launched in the US in March of last year. Actually, this week is New York Legal Week. And that was the first week for some of our reps. And that was like really getting thrown into the deep end. Here's the laptop. I went to the local Best Buy, got them a laptop, go demo on the floor. Right. And then they got this big nice picture in front of NASDAQ, you know, good engagement on LinkedIn, and then like straight into the business.
And that team has now grown to 100 We've moved into the super nice base down at Union Square, and with the Series D, we've raised 550 million, which I actually think is the biggest round ever in legal tech. But the thing is, raising a lot of money does not equate building the best product on the market. And when I did the internal announcement this Friday for the entire team, I told them, like, you know, this got us to this point. The funding is great validation, but it doesn't help our customers at all. Yes, we're going to be in business for a really long time, no matter what happens, but everything that we've done can get washed away, and all we need to do is in front of us. And so I think the ability to like re-inject that energy and keep the team powered up for what's next is very important in AI, because literally the things that we were building back in 2023 and 2024 and 2025 doesn't really exist in the product anymore. It's all moving so fast.

**Logan Bartlett** (3:24)
Maybe philosophically speak to that point, both at a literal level, like 12 months ago, what wasn't possible that is today, but then also how you think about being willing to build things that might be temporal or ephemeral in some ways.

**Max Jungestål** (3:39)
Yes, I think you need to recognize that if we know that we want to be here in 12 months or 24 months or 36 months, we cannot start by building that because people aren't ready to go and meet us at that level yet. So we need to build this staircase of features and of products and frankly teach people how to use the products and how to rethink their businesses because of them and to take them on the journey. So I think in some way, we're in the business of selling the transformation that these organizations and the teams that we work with have to go through. And I think a very concrete example is we actually built this feature back in 2024 that would automatically flag risks. And we built up this extensive taxonomy. We went out to find all these risks and categorize them and built this very custom tuned LLM flow that would assign a risk to everything.