Norwegian startup Moritz raises $9m to build an AI-native law firm
Moritz, a Norwegian legal tech startup, closed a $9 million pre-seed round in four days after graduating from Y Combinator's spring batch. The round was led by 20VC and the Urban Innovation Fund, with backing from 20 unicorn founders including executives from Reddit, Instacart, Dropbox, Hugging Face and Silo AI.
The startup takes a different approach than other legal AI companies. Rather than selling software tools to existing law firms, Moritz is building its own AI-enabled law firm from scratch.
"Law firms and existing legal service providers are too slow and not incentivised to use AI efficiently," cofounder Pamir Ehsas said. "We're building the world's largest global law firm from scratch, so we're not selling our AI tools to anyone."
How Moritz operates
The company aims to have AI handle 80% of legal work, including client intake and first drafts. A team of 50+ contracted lawyers then finalizes the documents. Moritz's core operations and engineering team consists of just seven people.
Since launching in early 2026, Moritz has supported over 100 companies with deals totaling more than $2 billion in aggregate contract value across Europe, the US and Australia. The company completes work in an average of four hours.
Moritz focuses on automatable work: commercial, corporate and employment law. It excludes litigation, immigration and tax work.
Expansion plans
The startup recently established its US law firm and moved its headquarters to San Francisco. It already operates in the UK and is expanding to Spain, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, France and Sweden.
Ehsas said the strategy involves partnering with large companies to build country-specific infrastructure, then rolling out to other companies once volume reaches a threshold.
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