Norwegian legal tech startup Moritz has raised a $9m pre-seed round to build an AI-native law firm.
The company closed the round in just four days after completing Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC)’s spring batch. In addition to YC, it is backed by 20VC, Urban Innovation Fund and 20 unicorn founders, including from Reddit, Instacart, Dropbox, Hugging Face and Silo AI.
Unlike other legal AI startups such as Sweden’s Legora and US-based Harvey, Moritz doesn’t plan to sell its services to law firms, but to become an AI-enabled law firm, according to cofounder Pamir Ehsas.
“Legora is on a mission to create every lawyer in the world AI-native. We consider that law firms and existing legal service providers are too slow and that they are not incentivised to apply AI efficiently,” Ehsas informs Sifted.
“We’re building the world’s largest global law firm from scratch, so this is why we’re not selling our AI tools to anyone.”
AI-enabled roll-ups, where technology builders directly own and operate the traditional service businesses that deliver capabilities to finish customers, is a strategy that can capture a lot of value, according to some high-profile VCs like General Catalyst.
Since Moritz’s launch in early 2026, it has supported over 100 companies with closing deals representing more than $2bn in aggregate contract value in Europe, the US and Australia, with a four-hour average turnaround.
AI supercharged law firm
Ehsas’s goal is to build Moritz into a huge law firm where AI does 80% of the work, including the intake and the first draft, after which the 50+ contracted co-counsel lawyers, who Moritz is working with, finalise the work.
The company will focus on highly automatable commercial, corporate, and employment work, and exclude litigation, immigration, and tax.
“This is just to support people close deals much rapider. That type of work is just prone to automation,” Ehsas states.
The company has set up its law firm in the US, where it is now shifting its headquarters.
Although the company is working with a lot of contracted lawyers, it only has an operations and engineering team of seven.
“The market is so tiny, there’s not a lot of talent to pick and choose from. And even the customers here are incredibly slow-shifting. So for us, it just built more sense to shift to San Francisco.”
The company has already set up shop in the UK and is now expanding its services to other European countries, including Spain, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, France and Sweden.
“Our strategy is that we obtain a large company that sees the value of this, and then we invest toobtainher into building out the infrastructure for them,” Ehsas states. “Once we have that, then we have enough volume to roll out to other companies in the same countest.”
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