How Legora Went From YC to $100M ARR in 18 Months

Max Junestrand was a college student in Sweden with a McKinsey offer in his back pocket. Instead, he and two co-founders went all in on legal AI — and built Legora (YC W24) into one of the fastest-growing enterprise companies in history, surpassing $100M in ARR in just 18 months. Today, Legora is one of Europe's most valuable AI startups, recently valued at $5.6B, with close to 500 employees serving 1,000+ organizations across 50+ markets. In this fireside with YC General Partner Gustaf Alströmer at our Stockholm event in April, Max shares how Legora found its way into legal AI, why it moved so fast after YC, and how it convinced one of the world's most conservative industries to embrace a new way of working. He also digs into fundraising, competing in the age of foundation models, scaling a founder-led culture, and why Legora's ambition goes far beyond legal tech. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a Startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs 00:00 —Max Junestrand, CEO of Legora 03:11 — Starting Out: What Were You Thinking? 04:36 — Risk, McKinsey Offers & Taking the Leap 05:37 — Getting Into YC 07:06 — Arriving With Imposter Syndrome 09:59 — The YC Fundraise Grind 11:31 — Staying Confident Through the No's 12:00 — Building the Next Google From Europe 14:25 — Mini Games & the Product Manifesto 16:28 — $100M ARR, 500 People, Going Global 19:15 — M&A Agents Doing the Actual Work 20:41 — What If OpenAI Does This? 21:27 — Finding Your Moat as Models Get Smarter

Gustaf AlströmerhostMax Junestrandguest

Jun 5, 202622mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

20 min read · 4,194 words

0:00 – 3:11
Max Junestrand, CEO of Legora
1. GAGustaf Alströmer
  All right.
2. MJMax Junestrand
  What do you wanna talk about?
3. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Uh, well, I want to start talking about Jude Law.
4. MJMax Junestrand
  Oh. [laughs]
5. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Um, how-
6. MJMax Junestrand
  Oh, Jude. [laughs]
7. GAGustaf Alströmer
  How does one, um, how does one grab Jude Law to be, um, um, your profile in advertising?
8. MJMax Junestrand
  So has anybody ever looked at advertisement or marketing for a legal technology company and said, "That's fucking sexy"? No. It is the most boring, the most bland. It makes, like, automotive parts look hot.
9. GAGustaf Alströmer
  [laughs]
10. MJMax Junestrand
  And I think it was after at least one bottle of wine in the office and somebody going, "You know this, like, AI-powered law slogan we have? What if we got, like, Jude Law to, like, say it? 'Hey, I'm AI powered law.' And then, like, you know, use the computer a bit." And we were like, "That's a great idea."
11. GAGustaf Alströmer
  [laughs]
12. MJMax Junestrand
  So we went to an agency, and we were like, "Hey, can you get in touch with, uh, with Jude Law?" And they said, "Absolutely not. He's impossible to get." And there's this very weird moment in Hollywood right now where a lot of the big actors and screenwriters are anti-AI because they're starting to write a lot of the scripts. They're setting the colors. They're doing cinematography. And so for an actor to go and stand behind an AI company is a quite big stance in the market. And we got into contact with Jude after chasing him for about six months, and he said, "Absolutely not." [laughs] But then we were like, what is Jude going to bite after? He is a sophisticated person. So we got on a call, and we're like, "But Jude, like, just let us show you the product. Like, let me show you our customer testimonials." And we sent him some of our videos, and we sent him these quotes. We have a customer Slack channel that's called Customer Love, and it's just, like, these quotes from, like, Teams and Outlook where lawyers are going, "I use Legora to review 1,000 agreements in one day, and I got home to see my family in time for the weekend." And we just, like, plastered a PowerPoint with, like, so many of these slogans, and he was like, "Wow, this is amazing. I wanna... Like, I can get behind this. But it's really important for me that I stay Jude Law. Like, I don't wanna be a person... I don't wanna be Legora. I wanna be Jude Law." And we went, "Well, what if we're just like, 'There's a new face [laughs] of law,' and then we ru- run with it?" And he said, "I wanna bring my own screenwriter. I wanna bring my own, um, cinematographer." And he ended up getting a Saturday Night Live scripter [laughs] and the cinematographer of Oppenheimer. [laughs] And we were like, "Whoo." You know, we raised a lot of money, but, you know, not that much money.
13. GAGustaf Alströmer
  [laughs]
14. MJMax Junestrand
  Um, and, you know, they went into the studio, and they just, like, came out with this amazing film. It was so funny. And now the marketing team at Legora have set a really high bar for themselves, so, uh, for the next campaign. So if anybody's working in marketing, we need your help.
15. GAGustaf Alströmer
  [laughs]
3:11 – 4:36
Starting Out: What Were You Thinking?
1. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Um, I love that. I, [clears throat] I, I saw the video, and I was like, wow, this is, like, amazing. And then, like, as I landed in Stockholm, it was everywhere, so.
2. MJMax Junestrand
  17 touchpoints.
3. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Yep. We need sales.
4. MJMax Junestrand
  And I'm, and I'm sure you sent it to all the great lawyers you know. You're like, "This is so funny. Like, you should look at this."
5. GAGustaf Alströmer
  I did.
6. MJMax Junestrand
  And we actually had a lead come in through somebody's mom was like, "Oh, what's, like, this Legora thing I've heard about?" And we're like, "Jude Law." And she's like, "Yes!" You know? So now we have the connection.
7. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Um, great. Let's talk about something else.
8. MJMax Junestrand
  That was a great opening question.
9. GAGustaf Alströmer
  I love it. I love it. Uh, let- let's talk about, um, the audience here. So a lot of people here are not starting companies. A lot of them are working at companies or working at startups or in school. Uh, when you were in school, how were you thinking about the options of what you should be doing with your life?
10. MJMax Junestrand
  You know, when I was in school, I just tried to do as much as possible. I couldn't... Like, I did a bit of computer science. I went and studied a bit of business. I did McKinsey. I worked at two other YC startups. I only did one week at Depict with Anton, and Anton then tried to hire me, and I said, "No, I'm gonna finish my degree." [laughs]
11. GAGustaf Alströmer
  [laughs]
12. MJMax Junestrand
  Um, and so I felt like I, I got to see quite a lot and, you know, frankly, people ask me, like, "Did we pick law, or did law pick me?" I think law picked me.
13. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Mm-hmm.
14. MJMax Junestrand
  And then we just decided to run like hell, and we never, you know, thought about doing something else.
4:36 – 5:37
Risk, McKinsey Offers & Taking the Leap
1. GAGustaf Alströmer
  How did you think about risk at the time? Like, did it seem that pure risky to you to start something, or did it seem like a natural step?
2. MJMax Junestrand
  Well, it didn't seem that risky to work on something over the summer [laughs] when I still had my full-time offer at McKinsey in the back of the pocket. Um, and then actually when we got this, got accepted into YC was when I called them, and I said, "I'm not coming back." And I'm actually not the only person, uh, at Legora who's done this. It's a group of, you know, 10, 15 people who had offers at McKinsey in particular.
3. GAGustaf Alströmer
  [laughs]
4. MJMax Junestrand
  Even Jake, our CTO-
5. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Yeah
6. MJMax Junestrand
  ... who was also a previous YC founder, um, he, he had put off his... He did an internship, and then he kept the offer for six years. [laughs] And they started calling like, "Are you ever coming back?" And then one time he says, "No, I'm not coming back." [laughs]
7. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Um, tell us about the, the YC, kind of like the ear- like you guys started, and then you applied to YC, and then what was like, just like what do you remember from-
8. MJMax Junestrand
  So let me-
9. GAGustaf Alströmer
  ... from, from, from the, the months before YC or the month that you were in YC?
10. MJMax Junestrand
  So let me paint,
5:37 – 7:06
Getting Into YC
1. MJMax Junestrand
  paint you the timeline here. So, so we started working in the summer of 2023, and there was, like, an early applicant program for the winter batch.
2. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Yes.
3. MJMax Junestrand
  It was like an AI... What did you guys-
4. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Yes, yes.
5. MJMax Junestrand
  Yeah, like an early applicant for AI company.
6. GAGustaf Alströmer
  It was the perfect timing. Like, your batch was probably the, not the peak, but it was the first best AI batch.
7. MJMax Junestrand
  Yeah. And so we got, like, an early application in, and, you know, hopefully you guys saw some change between the delta between our first interview and then three months later. And- When we got accepted, I re- remember you calling me and going, "Hey, are you gonna move to San Francisco?" And that's a trick question, everyone.
8. GAGustaf Alströmer
  [laughs]
9. MJMax Junestrand
  Say yes, and then you don't have to move.
10. GAGustaf Alströmer
  [laughs]
11. SPSpeaker
  [laughs]
12. MJMax Junestrand
  So I was like, "Yes, Gustaf. Yes, Gustaf, I'm gonna move." I'm still in Stockholm. Um, and after we got, uh, accepted, I think that bought us time. So we got the offer in August, and we were like, "Wow, this is really great. Now we have time before YC to, like, really work on the product, like, really get everything in order." And we didn't know what to expect of YC at all. I had actually expected a lot more companies to have figured things out. I expected coming into YC with, you know, lots of other really smart and good companies that were already doing tons of revenue and that knew what they were doing, and it was, you know, quite the opposite, actually.
7:06 – 9:59
Arriving With Imposter Syndrome
1. MJMax Junestrand
  Like, a lot of people were still searching. We realized that we had amongst the highest revenue in the batch.
2. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Yeah.
3. MJMax Junestrand
  And we were coming in with such FOMO, like, three college dropouts from Sweden, and we were like, "We're gonna meet these PhDs from, like, MIT and Google and da, da, da." And we just came in with, I think, a lot of confidence, but also with, uh, imposter syndrome. And when we became part of the batch, we actually took our company with us. So we were about 10 people in the company at the time, and all of the engineers came to us to live in the Airbnb. And so we were fucking grinding, and it was so... It was like a, like a real gulag. It was like a work camp. [laughs]
4. GAGustaf Alströmer
  [laughs]
5. MJMax Junestrand
  Like, I, I hope that Mi-Da isn't here to, like, put that in, in writing. But, like, we worked so fucking hard. [laughs] And we bought this really shitty food. And, like, me and the other sales guy, Tuhin, we bought this ring, like these lights to put on our laptops because we were doing sales calls between 1:00 AM and 10:00 AM-
6. GAGustaf Alströmer
  I remember that
7. MJMax Junestrand
  ... every day. And then we tried to sleep for a few hours, and then we'd go to YC. I think the thing that we had which a lot of other companies didn't was we already knew what we were gonna do. It was pretty clear to us at the time. And so I decided to move back to Sweden. I, uh, bunkered in a conference room, and I just started selling. And I was running around Stockholm with my little briefcase, and I think people were flabbergasted by the fact that somebody was so excited about legal technology because these, uh, chief innovation officers, these knowledge managers, these legal partners had never seen somebody be excited about selling them technology, ever. They're used to these really tired salespeople. And our product was, frankly, not that great, but they wanted to work with me, and they wanted to work with us. And p- half of them probably thought I was on cocaine. Like, they were...
8. SPSpeaker
  [laughs]
9. MJMax Junestrand
  I was like, "This is the fucking future, and you have to work with us. And we're gonna make you win. And by the way, the biggest firm in the Nordics already work with us, so if you don't, you're kind of a loser." And they were like, "Okay, I get it. I have to get on the train." And then we made a very tactical hot swap. So the team that was in, uh, in the US shipping NYC, they came back to take care of the customers because I had to go to YC to do the fundraise. And I think this is a underappreciated, uh, part of YC for at least first-time founders with very little network. Uh, there's a lot of investor reach, and there's a lot of signaling value to be in YC. You basically get a lot of investor inbound building up to demo day. And then you just schedule
9:59 – 11:31
The YC Fundraise Grind
1. MJMax Junestrand
  everything. So you have, like, 80 meetings in a week, and you just, like, start to crunch it out. And I have found that one of my real skills and strength is when it counts, I fucking deliver.
2. GAGustaf Alströmer
  [laughs]
3. MJMax Junestrand
  And so, you know, I got put in these investor conversations. I remember we did a practice round.
4. GAGustaf Alströmer
  We did, yes.
5. MJMax Junestrand
  I was pretty shitty. Like, we were... [laughs] Yeah. It's like, yeah, you were-
6. GAGustaf Alströmer
  We were tired and, tired and unprepared.
7. MJMax Junestrand
  We were tired, unprepared, bad. And I don't... You guys didn't... You guys gave some feedback, but you were probably like, "They're screwed."
8. GAGustaf Alströmer
  [laughs]
9. MJMax Junestrand
  And then we got into the, into when, like, skarpt läge. Like, it mattered, and we fucking smashed it. And I remember going to the Benchmark office, and Benchmark is one of these, like, legendary VC firms. And I sat down with Peter Fenton and with Chetan, who's now on our board, and we did a 30-minute pitch. They loved it. And I walked out, and Peter Fenton turned to Chetan and said, "The guy is perfect. The only problem is that he's from fucking Sweden."
10. SPSpeaker
  [laughs]
11. MJMax Junestrand
  And I'll tell you what, I don't think that's gonna be a problem anymore. We are fucking Showdown. [applause] And then it's like the... It's like a domino. Like, the next thing, you know, leads to the next thing, and you get put in these environments where you need to show up. You need to find a way to keep energy as you go
11:31 – 12:00
Staying Confident Through the No's
1. MJMax Junestrand
  along.
2. GAGustaf Alströmer
  This is hard because as you start racking up nos from investors, you start reading into the nos and thinking, "They must be right. I must be wrong," and you get a little bit sadder for every meeting. It's hard to keep your momentum and your energy up, but you have to because investors, they can see that. They can, they can smell it, that you are not confident in your own company. And in order to get anyone else to be confident that you're gonna succeed, you have to be confident yourself.
3. MJMax Junestrand
  Yes.
4. GAGustaf Alströmer
  And I think you had that naturally.
5. MJMax Junestrand
  Yeah, I can... I think I can
12:00 – 14:25
Building the Next Google From Europe
1. MJMax Junestrand
  on, on the go create that. [laughs] And, you know, one, one of the other things is that some companies will work out, and some companies will not, and that's okay. And, you know, we have thought a lot about what we want to do in the long term with Legora. Um, we have decided that this is our life's work, and I've decided that personally. This is my company. And so- When you've decided that you're-- The amount that you care and your ambition, I feel like it creeps up. And so, you know, one day would love to erase that legal in front of legal tech Legora. And, you know, I think one of the best companies in the world is Google because of their, um, their breadth. Like, they created such a good business in advertisement and search that they got the opportunity to do self-driving cars within the same umbrella, Alphabet. Like, that's fucking cool. And Facebook was so successful that, I mean, they're kind of fumbling the ball a bit, but, you know, at least they, like, tried to go do Meta, and it was, like, a cool idea. Um, I used to build video games for, for the VR headset then. I remember being very nauseous when I had to game test all of them myself. Um, and that's what we wanna do with Legora. We wanna create from Europe... I mean, the largest tech company we have is SAP. [chuckles] Like, fucking SAP, are you serious? And now I think there's a unique moment in time where the leverage and, and shift can happen, and I tell this to law firms all the time. You know, if you're ranked number one hundred and fifty in the US, AI is your fucking ticket to go from one fifty to ten, right? And I think this is our opportunity as well from this p-part of the world. Um, technology is democratizing access to technology, access to talent, and the only thing we need is the ambition. And at Legora, we actually did the math. Fifteen percent of our entire engineering and product organization are ex-YC founders. And so we're just a group of people that I think have all, you know, like, locked arms, and we're like, together, you know, apes together strong. You know the meme? Yeah. That's like Legora. And now we get to build something truly, truly massive together, which I'm, um, you know, equally excited about with the organization and the team that we're building as much about as the product.
14:25 – 16:28
Mini Games & the Product Manifesto
1. GAGustaf Alströmer
  We do say at YC every startup is a series of mini-games, and once you won your mini-game, you're on to your next one. And now-
2. MJMax Junestrand
  Yeah
3. GAGustaf Alströmer
  ... you are winning a mini-game, and you won multiple ones, but you're on to your next one. Maybe that's about to start now.
4. MJMax Junestrand
  Yes. But I also remember in October of 2024 was when we went into full, like, general availability. We were, like, 30 people in the company, and I had a slide. And we had three core features. We had our, our agent and our assistant, we had this big thing called tabular review, and then we had a Word add-in. And we wrote a three-paged Word document that was our Product Manifesto, and it basically said, "We're gonna be the best in the chat, we're gonna be best on this table thing, and we're gonna be the best in Word." And there just happened to be one company that only focused on building this Word add-in and one company who only focused on building this tabular review thing, and then, of course, you had ChatGPT for the assistant. And we said, "If we can be the best at all these three and bundle them, we will win." But the problem was we were doing one million ARR. The company that was only focused on the table thing, they were doing almost fifty. They were doing fifty times our revenue focused on one single thing, and we had the other stuff as well. And now we just enormously surpassed them, and we've churned so many of their clients. So I think it's also to be, um, to be mentioned that it's easy to over-focus on the, like, here and now, and you do need a-- Even in this, like, very fast-moving, short-term world, you need to have a slightly longer horizon strategy of how you're going to win. Uh, PJ had a fun, uh, advice at the office that we should write a sci-fi novel about, you know, what a lawyer ten years from now and how they will work. Because at the end of the day, it's that future we are building for. And when others are opportunistic, like, we will dig into the groun- to the ground and, like, k-keep grinding it out.
16:28 – 19:15
$100M ARR, 500 People, Going Global
1. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Where is Legora today? Um, you passed $100 million in ARR.
2. MJMax Junestrand
  Yeah.
3. GAGustaf Alströmer
  And I don't even know how many people that work at the company.
4. MJMax Junestrand
  So-
5. GAGustaf Alströmer
  But things are going well
6. MJMax Junestrand
  ... things are going fucking great. Um, we-- This time last year, we were 40 people. We're now close to 500, spread all the way from San Francisco to Chicago to Texas to New York, London, Stockholm, Germany, India, Australia. We are going global, uh, 'cause turns out lawyers work the same way all over the world, give or take. And the energy and the feeling in the company is that, you know, we've-- we're about to hit base camp, and now the real climb is about to begin. We have sort of proven it to ourselves that we could do this part of the journey, but nobody is content. We wake up, we're excited, we're going hard. And I think one of the things that is, that is very clear is that Legora is run by a lot of founders in the entire company, and so there's, like, a lot of this founder mode energy. And different product departments are basically run by ex-CEOs, and so they're all just running at full speed ahead. And the things that I'm most excited for i-is actually the change that happened over Christmas. So I think everybody here felt, like, a big step change in the, uh, intelligence of the, and the capabilities of the models and what that has unlocked for us in the product. And the approach that we had for a really long time was about how do we augment the lawyer and the work that they're doing? How do we help them in their, like, individual task? But now, because of the capabilities of the agents and the harness that we have built for our type of tasks, the content that we now have access to, all the different tools, and the trust that we have within these large enterprises where we can access all of their documents, all of their emails, like, now we can build really powerful, um- Proactive agents in a way. And so, you know, instead of opening your email inbox and it's sort of like super messy, and if you're a law firm partner, you have, you know, 500 geared up from, from just yesterday. Like, Legora will have taken that looking in the con- looked in the context of all the matters that are happening. It will have done work on your behalf. And we're starting to actually move into a world where one of our main bottlenecks is evals for end-to-end work products. Because we're no longer just working with an individual task, we're really looking at the sort of-
7. GAGustaf Alströmer
  What's an example?
19:15 – 20:41
M&A Agents Doing the Actual Work
1. MJMax Junestrand
  An example would be a, a large M&A transaction where there's like many different steps. You can break down the steps and take the due diligence part, for instance, where you get the entire data room, and then you... Well, f- often it's like completely unstructured, so the Legora agent now has access to tools where it can manipulate the file tree.
2. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Mm-hmm.
3. MJMax Junestrand
  So you can just tell it like, "Hey, structure the data room. Here's our template folder structure." And it's just like, beep-bop-
4. GAGustaf Alströmer
  [laughs]
5. MJMax Junestrand
  ... you know, let me go do it. And then you tell it, "Okay, it's this type of company. Here's the type of diligence, uh, questions that we wanna run through. Let me know if any content is missing." And then Legora starts to do the thing. And some of these tasks take 20 minutes, 30 minutes. They take a long time to run. And so now the lawyer or the legal professional is moving from like working with it, um, in real time to very much like working with Cursor or Claude Code. Like you're giving broader instructions, and then you're having the agents go out and do work in parallel. And I think that has been a very exciting movement for us. I feel like we're also trailing like six months behind code. So code will always be at the frontier because it's naturally a lot easier. It's binary. It's, um, uh, the context problem is a lot easier. The models have been trained on it sort of out of the box. And so it's very easy for us to see where the future is headed within our domain just looking
20:41 – 21:27
What If OpenAI Does This?
1. MJMax Junestrand
  at that.
2. GAGustaf Alströmer
  Got it. Um, thank you. The question that a lot of people have, uh, are talking about is [clears throat] when I was in YC, um, the question we always got is what if Google does this? And it was a valid question at the time 'cause they were actually pretty good. Uh, now over the next 15 years, they didn't do that very much. Like, they actually did not execute on almost anything of the new internal products that, new products that they started. And eventually started sort of somewhat laughing at the question. Maybe not in AI, but on the other topics we were kinda laughing at the question. Um, you're getting the question or other founders here are gonna think about what is OpenAI going to do? What is Anthropic going to do? Um, and I'm curious mostly what you have for a founder who's worried about that-
3. MJMax Junestrand
  Yeah
4. GAGustaf Alströmer
  ... like what, what do you tell them?
21:27 – 22:46
Finding Your Moat as Models Get Smarter
1. MJMax Junestrand
  So I would view it very much... You, you, you, we've actually seen this play out one time before with, um, databases and infrastructure and AWS, and I think you can look at companies like MongoDB and, you know, how did they position themselves against AWS, and what did they build which wasn't natural for a bigger platform like AWS to build? Um, and I think the real question is like what is your moat when the models continue to get smarter, right? I think that's the sort of real underlying question here. It's not like is Anthropic gonna do it? Is OpenAI gonna do it? It's like what's defensible in your business assuming a continuous, uh, either exponential or linear increase in the model intelligence? 'Cause if we all think about a world where the model is so good that it on the fly writes all the code, gets all the data, figures out all the pri- like everything to solve a task, then we should all go have a pina colada instead. And so I don't just, I like, I naturally don't think that's gonna be the end state. And so what we think a lot about is what are the, uh, inputs and outputs? What, what is the proprietary data? What are the workflow moats? What is the behavior that we're teaching our users? And I think for Legora, we understood that we had to get big fast.

Episode duration: 22:46

Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript

Transcript of episode mjmswQurIU4

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

iOS

Android

Claude

Chrome