Casper Laursen and Søren Brokær launched Pandektes in early 2023 with a straightforward mission: to challenge the stranglehold that a handful of publishers have maintained over legal research across Europe. Neither founder came from a legal background, and the legal community they approached was largely dismissive of their ambitions. Yet three and a half years later, the Copenhagen-based company has attracted more than 500 clients and just closed a €13.5M Series A round led by Munich's Alstin Capital, with participation from PROfounders, Scale Capital and earlier backers.
The core problem Pandektes addresses is deceptively simple: legal documents exist across millions of sources, scattered and difficult to locate. Lawyers have long relied on established providers—LexisNexis, Westlaw, Beck, Karnov—to aggregate and organize this material, paying premium prices for the privilege. Switching away from these incumbents has been prohibitively expensive, even as subscription costs have climbed. Pandektes gathers these sources, structures them intelligently, and enables rapid discovery through AI-powered search.
Building a company like this requires relentlessness, belief and dedication. Every start-up will have low points, but we've always as founders had this die hard conviction that we could build a better and new way to do legal research
Casper Laursen, CEO and co-founder of Pandektes
The founders' outsider status proved both an obstacle and an advantage. Lawyers approached with caution, and trust accumulated slowly. In early 2023, skepticism about what large language models could accomplish in legal contexts was widespread. Yet precisely because Laursen and Brokær stood outside the profession, they could perceive what the industry had normalized: most law is publicly available, but assembling it reliably for courtroom use has always demanded substantial editorial infrastructure. They wagered that AI could handle much of that work, freeing lawyers to search from a far richer foundation.
Building the platform required countless conversations with legal practitioners to understand how AI could fit the needs of different practice areas. The company's first customer arrived with a familiar challenge: managing procedural research and knowledge transfer between experienced and junior staff. Pandektes delivered value immediately, and that organization has remained a paying user for over three years, providing feedback that shaped the product's evolution.
It's a special sort of challenge to build a company into a highly monopolized market, and also one we heard many lawyers early on 'warning' us about
Casper Laursen and Søren Brokær
Those early years—spent building trust and accumulating a dataset reliable enough for legal work—were the most demanding. Yet Pandektes brought an AI search product to market quickly, and according to Laursen, incumbents needed one to two years to develop competing offerings. That head start has allowed the startup to maintain a development pace the established players have struggled to match. When the company raised €2.9M in seed funding in February 2025, just over 100 organizations were using the platform. Since then, revenue has grown sixfold over the past year, and roughly two-thirds of organizations that trial the platform convert to paying customers, often canceling their previous subscriptions in the process.
We have rarely seen a market like legal research, where so many end-users would like to switch their core system but historically simply couldn't
Andreas Schenk, managing partner at Alstin Capital
The new capital will enable Pandektes to expand beyond its current strongholds in Denmark, Germany and Switzerland into broader European and North American markets. Part of the funding will support an API that opens the platform's document collection to third-party developers.
When asked about particularly elusive legal sources, Laursen noted that Pandektes has not encountered a single dramatic case. That absence is itself revealing. Hard-to-find law is not an anomaly but a structural feature of legal systems. Rather than pursuing documents individually, Pandektes continuously ingests difficult-to-access sources—often the very ones that determine court outcomes. The company does not view legal AI workspaces, which firms use to draft and review documents, as direct competitors.
Laursen sees broader implications for legal access. More people are already turning to general-purpose AI tools to understand their rights and advocate for themselves, a trend he supports. Yet smaller courts and administrative bodies report that the results fall short. Documents may look legally sound, but arguments frequently omit important sources or misapply methodology. Improved chatbots alone cannot bridge this gap. What is needed is access to the same authoritative sources professionals use.
If we get that right, someone without legal training should be able to understand their rights far more effectively than they can today, without pretending that legal expertise won't matter
Casper Laursen
Source: The Next Web
