Norwegian startup Moritz raises $9 million to build an AI-native law…

Team S · 2026-05-07T14:04:33.000Z

Moritz, a Norwegian legal tech startup, has raised a $9 million pre-seed round to build an AI-native law firm. The round closed in just four days after the company completed Y Combinator's spring 2026 batch and was led by YC, 20VC, and Urban Innovation Fund. Backers also include 20 unicorn founders from companies including Reddit, Instacart, Dropbox, Hugging Face, and Silo AI. Unlike legal AI startups such as Legora and Harvey, which sell tools to existing law firms, Moritz's model is to become an AI-powered law firm itself. Co-founder Pamir Ehsas argues that traditional law firms are too slow and lack the incentive to deploy AI efficiently — so instead of selling to them, Moritz is building a global law firm from scratch where AI handles 80% of the work, including intake and first drafts, with a network of 50+ contracted co-counsel lawyers finalising the output. The company focuses on highly automatable commercial, corporate, and employment work, and deliberately excludes litigation, immigration, and tax. Since launching in early 2026, it has supported over 100 companies in closing deals with more than $2 billion in aggregate contract value across Europe, the US, and Australia, with an average turnaround time of four hours. Despite its Norwegian roots, Moritz is moving its headquarters to San Francisco, where it operates with a core team of just seven in operations and engineering. It has already established its law firm entity in the US and the UK, and is now expanding into Spain, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, France, and Sweden — targeting large anchor clients in each market to build the volume needed to scale across each country.

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Norwegian startup Moritz raises $9 million to build an AI-native law… | Newnex