Ep 82: Behind Legora's $550M Raise, Model Competition, Doubling Revenue Every Quarter, & US Expansion

Lavour has been one of the fastest growing companies in AI these past years. Since we partner with them since the series A, it's just been absolutely insane to watch the Paces team moves up. The product improvements, the growth, really just such an impressive company. And today on Unsupervised Learning, we had Max Unistron, CEO of Lagouron, to share some exciting news. They're $550 million series D, led by Excel at an over $5.5 billion valuation. And my colleague Logan and I had a lot of fun sitting down with Max and talking about a bunch of things. We hit on competition from the foundation models and how he thinks about what Anthropic will alone do. We talked about some of these AI enabled services like an AI enabled law firm and what he thinks about those business models. We talked about what it's like building an AI company and how that's different from traditional SaaS companies. And we talked about how he gets his team AI first and some of the changes they've made there. Max is just blown me away of these past years with how fast this company has moved and how impressive he is. And I think folks that will really see that in this episode and start really encouraging to listen without further ado, here's Max. So Max, I think it's been what, 10 months since your last podcast appearance here? Yeah, something like that. And a new couch. Yeah, we got a new set up here and I know 10 months is like, you know, an infinite number of years in the Laura time. I think you've had some pretty big news since then and some big news to share today. We have. We're just signing us here's D. I booked my flights home from San Francisco at 12 p.m. on the Friday. And I told David our CFO that I'm going to sign the term sheet before I get on this plane. And I got it Thursday 2 a.m. checked by LaGora checked by the lawyers signed it and got on the flight. Get us up to speed on on kind of the round where the business is today. Yeah, I mean, look, the last 10 months have been anything, nothing short of astronomical. Basically since October in 2024, we've doubled the business every single quarter and we launched in the US in March of last year. Actually, this week is New York legal week and that was the first week for some of our reps. And that was like really getting thrown into the deep end. Here's the laptop. I went to the local Best Buy. I got them a laptop. Go down more on the floor. Right. And then they got this big nice picture in front of NASDAQ. You know, good engagement on LinkedIn. And then like straight into the business. And that team has now grown to 100. We've moved into the super nice base down at Union Square. And with this series D, we've raised 550 million, which I actually think is the biggest round ever in legal tech. But the thing is raising a lot of money does not equate building the best product on the market. And when I did the internal announcement this Friday for the entire team, I told them like, you know, this got us to this point. The funding is great validation, but it doesn't help our customers at all. Yes, we're going to be in business for a really long time no matter what happens. But everything that we've done can get washed away and all we need to do is in front of us. And so I think the ability to like re-inject that energy and keep the team powered up for what's next. Is very important in AI because literally the things that we were building back in 2023 and 2024 and 2025 doesn't really exist in the product anymore. It's all moving so fast. Maybe philosophically speak to that point, both at a literal level like 12 months ago. What wasn't possible that is today. But then also how you think about being willing to build things that might be temporal or ephemeral in some ways. Yes, I think you need to recognize that if we know that we want to be here in 12 months or 24 months or 36 months, we cannot start by building that because people aren't ready to go and meet us at that level yet. So we need to sort of build this staircase of features and of products and frankly like teach people like how to use the products and how to rethink their businesses because of them and to take them on the journey. So I think in some way we're in the business of selling the transformation that these organizations and the teams that we work with have to go through. And I think a very concrete example is we actually built this feature back in 2024 that would like automatically flag risks. And we built up this extensive taxonomy like we went out to find all these risks and categorize them and built this like very custom tuned LLM flow that would like assign a risk to everything. And then you just throw like one of the you know latest models like Opus 4.5 or 4.6 on the problem and it solves it magically. But that was a really good product back in 2024 and it helped us get to where we are today. So I think from a talent perspective and an internal comms you need to have such a low ego. You need to be willing to work on stuff that is very important for nine months and then it all gets washed away and we get to build a new thing. And I think increasingly with the sort of agentic pivot that is happening we're all now being challenged in the way that we do even our own work like am I now doing a task that should be be done by an agent or is this actually work that should be done by human because I think and I'm of the opinion that if AI can do a piece of task it will do that piece of task. It has sort of been conquered. It's in the realm of I saw this spider shard like flowing on a link from enthrame and it's kind of like well if it's in that I think it was red or blue like if it's in that realm it's like done. Nobody now has to spend their time doing that. But the reality is only 1% of users have actually gotten to automating that particular task. So there's a big job in also bringing in the other 99% up to speed. I guess one question on the model side has has the experience for the in customer has been a linear journey in terms of what they experience from lagora or has there been a step function with the tasks and actually think it's a real step function and it's almost like you get to a point where something can be done and then it's conquered. I'll give you a very concrete example. Back in 2024 we were working with this very large firm on automating limited partnership agreement key term review reports. Very particular task. Very sexy. I was like damn I'm so happy I went into legal time. Yes. And in the summer of 2024 we were like 60% accurate on that task. By the end of the summer we were 100% accurate and that firm completely transitioned their business model on that task. They moved from taking an associate three three days and a billable hour model to being a five hour turnaround because they would still do the manual checking and a fixed fee. Obviously people always talk about you know what's the future of the billable hour and some of these changes in the industry. What have you kind of seen around some of these new models so far? So we started working with a lot of the law firms because the law firms have an interesting predicament which is if we're both offering a venture financing at $250,000 or maybe it's cheaper $100,000 and the firm down the road now offers it at $75,000 and twice the turnaround speed because they leverage AI. You and I are both screwed. Like the equilibrium and the low level of differentiation that exists in a lot of the work like breaks the equilibrium. So if they announce that hey we procured the goura and we're being so effective with it internally we both have to go do the same. So I think initially in the market the law firms were sort of faced with the while if my competitor has it I need to have it and if they are doing a good job driving AI literacy and empowering their people I'm going to have to do a good job with that. The interesting thing now is the enterprises has woken up and the big banks and the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies and the guys who are spending a lot of money on legal services they are now realizing that we are starting to see what these tools can do we are going to start to demand that our law firms and panel firms are leveraging that technology to serve us in the most effective way possible. So if the law firms had it their way nothing would change. You know we increase the bill of our 10% every year we continue making more money but the clients are now starting to put real pressure and expectations on them and I think that's driving the changed behavior. So yes I'm seeing different firms in different practice areas lean in to sort of different degrees and I think it's frankly more partner dependent than like firm dependent because every law firm is basically like of you know 300 CEOs and they all run their own book of business and so consolidating ways of working is actually quite hard. Yeah and what if you noticed kind of in the firms that are maybe most for a leaning on this how you know obviously you have individual pockets but at a firm level like what are folks doing to actually diffuse this. Well I think we have an amazing announcement today with Dubbo voice and their release of the star portal on LaGora that their clients can now collaborate with them on and they had this built in another system before and now they're sort of bringing all of that over to LaGora and the partners there are thinking about how do I get scale in my business because I only have you know 14 hours 16 hours a day of work in me and I have so many clients that I could theoretically serve with these insights and with this advice. And so, LaGora gives them scale. Well, it feels like there's like a Geven's paradox type thing here where there's some, if you're Blackstone or something, you get the A+ legal service that exists today. But it's hard to scale the provision of that across more and more folks. And I think if you're able to encode some of your IP and knowledge into these tools, it really provides a powerful way to do that. Yeah, I mean, I am convinced that you will have a firm AI. That's being able to leverage your precedent and your organizational memory and context of how you do things. And I think we've seen now this new paradigm of skills, which is sort of more in the matrix when you want to ride the motorbike like you just download that skill and the model is able to do it. And so the models are going to be tapping into all kinds of things to do work on our behalf. And I think as a practitioner, you are not going to be limited by systems that can do work. You will be limited by the own human factor of how many agents can I effectively guide. Like if you've tried coding with five of cloud code at the same time, it's like a lot of mental load. It's a bit like playing Starcraft, right? It's like how many units can you actually control towards like a singular mission? Your business is writing commercial software and leveraging AI in a meaningful way. You sell into an industry that has been one of the early adopters or the ones that have had to reckon with AI in a meaningful way. I guess I'm curious like you gave the advice for what the law firms are doing that have been successful. But for people in general, I think this is going to impact every industry under the sun. If you were future-proofing yourself in another industry, what are some of the tactics that those best firms have done that you would internalize? So I think both firms, but also what we are doing internally, right? I am really pushing both leaders and ISIS on given where the models are today and where we think they're going to be a quarter from now, like which pieces of your work now falls under this spider diagram of it's like the models can do it. And how do we set ourselves up in a way so that we can have a real velocity? Like we're going to scale from 400 to 900 this year. But I'm not sure how big Legora has to be in order to be like a billionaire or a company. I actually don't think it's that big if we can truly lean into all of this. And I think it's different at an organizational level where you have 6,000 legal professionals you sort of need to bring up this bid versus if you have a deep superuser. And I think the superusers are going to be even more valuable. Like they will get exponentially more valuable, even internally at Legora. We did this leaderboard of who's been using a cloud code and cursor the most and I was surprised that nobody was spending more than that. But still it was a real power graph, right? And then the question is, okay, well how effective and how much work can you get done if you lean in with these systems? And maybe engineering has come the furthest, but it's not only happening in law, it's happening in marketing and in finance and in HR and in every single vertical. And I think it requires like system thinkers, I think it requires again low ego to be able to say, this is something I built my career around doing and that is no longer a meaningful thing to do. Maybe you can do it for the art of it, but it's like, we have tractors, get mining, like going on the fields and going out and doing it by hand would just seem crazy to people. One of the things that people talk a lot about in, I guess, AI native software is the pricing models and we talked a little bit about the pricing models for law firms themselves. But I'm curious, we still largely sell seats today. I think the only market we've really seen outcome based pricing quote unquote Jacob correct me if I'm wrong, because for sports teams like the one that that's been the clearest value prop and you know, for a bunch of different reasons. I guess as you think about where your business is today and where it's going over time, do you think, hey, the cognitive load of selling seats versus outcomes, like it's just there's a lot less friction doing it this way. And so we'll be doing this way for a long time. Or do you think like we're nearing so I think all comes is really difficult. And I'll explain why doing a MNAT deal in Canada is different to doing an MNAT deal in the US or doing it in India or doing it in Australia. And there will be local pricing power sort of packaged into that service that gets delivered and you can have a very sort of wide range of outcomes in terms of like what is an MNAT deal. And then you have the small aqua hire tuck ins. And the work is like very, very different as a pricing that I think is extraordinarily difficult. Maybe you could say per document reviewed, something like that, maybe can find a model. But I think the firms and the enterprises both have kind of a hard time internalizing that. And so one of the things I've optimized for is speed to market or like how quick can you get up and running. And if you're used to buying seats, then that seems like a good way to buy them today. Now with a lot of these new, energetic launches we have, you will see that the models are performing a lot more work on your behalf and they're using up a lot more tokens. There's a lot more tokens that are going into the sort of under the hood, right? Whether it's questioning itself, it's double checking, it's planning, it's executing, it's reflecting, it's updating, it's memory, like it's doing so many things behind the scenes. But that's when you start to need to rethink maybe the way that those tokens get transacted in the platform. Sort of a bit of a tibetit. I'm sure there's lots of folks listening that are scared there firm or companies a little behind here like what would you tell them around what doesn't, doesn't work in the, in the agent world today? Well, so first off, I think everybody's feeling like they're behind. Right. And so maybe a slide. You guys are feeling that way. Yeah, yeah, what helps us mere mortal sense. We are, I think the most AI native company I know and we're feeling behind because the problem is it's so hard to disrupt your own way of working whilst doing the work. And so you'd almost want to have like a digital twin of everybody at La Gora who like could continue doing the work for a bit and then you just, you're in charge of like automating away yourself anyway. Like if you could get there, that would be fabulous. Because then I think there's so many other problems we could go solve with that capacity. Right. My advice is really just like start, experiment and like maybe don't go too big too quickly. Like I think if you find something that you find a lot of value and I'll give you an example. If we've automated our security questionnaires, we spend a lot of time with law firms, banks, insurance companies, like very regulated entities. And so we go through a lot of security questionnaires and we've automated the filling in of those and in RFPs. And that's amazing. Like that's a task that nobody likes doing at La Gora. Obviously a lot of our own legal work. Our sales reps actually leverage La Gora's own playbook functionality to mark up NDAs. They are not allowed to go to the legal team. You need to mark them up yourself together with La Gora. And I think all of that stuff sparks the creativity and gets you going. And that can sort of hopefully get you on the journey of automating more. Yeah. We want to be fascinated if your thoughts on it. It seems like these days everyone is asking questions around competition, you know, from foundation models, vibe coding solutions, you know, where all the stuff fits in. You know, I think over the last month, you know, anthropic launch the skills for, you know, legal product and the same day Thompson and Alexis stocks were down and you know, everyone's questioning whether there's any future beyond the models. We've seen this pattern now repeat in cyber and other industries. Like what did you make of all that? Does it make any sense? So it was really funny. We were just about to start the fundraise when that came out. And you had this like very fun reaction in the market, which is we don't want the public sauce stock, but demand for La Gora private stock was through the roof, right? We raised over half a billion dollars and we had over 1.5 billion dollars in demand for the round, which is incredible. So what I think happened was there was a market correction, which is that traditional sauce companies who don't have the velocity, the talent, the rigor and the drive and ambition to like go and claim this new green field that's up for grabs, they should be less valued. Because when you're paying, you know, and valuating these big software companies, they still have the capacity to grow a lot. Now you see companies like Lagora who sort of 10x in every year and we're playing against them. So where do you want to bet? I think the second part is the models becoming more generally useful and the spot light starting to show that, they're actually not only good at writing code, they can do lots of different things. It's very helpful for us. I think the whole Cloud4Legal helped LaGora get even more attention because even if the models are doing they can do 80% of the work out of the box. It's the last 20% that takes 99% of the time and is really hard and where you need taste and you need maintainability and you're actually not buying an existing solution to a problem you have today only. You're also buying the team and the vision of everything else that's to come because you are really busy running your firm and you're really busy running your legal team. As you actually want somebody else to come in and build for you and whenever the models get new capabilities we factor that in. You basically have a team that is nonstop thinking about the applicability of these models to your space. To your point it changes so much every three, four months. It's more than a full-time job. Just keeping up with the models and the latest developments of them. I think every organization should be working with applying AI across the field. I think what's really exciting about legal in particular is that it's been so underserved with great software. Finance and all these other industries have had lots of good things come and go because numbers are easy to work with. Language is really hard. Now with GPD 3.5 it's like flipped. Do you think that we're going to see Claude code as an example? They're obviously now in a head-to-head battle from pushing up with cursor in some ways and other vendors in the space. Do you think that legal will see the Claude code equivalent, maybe Claude legal, ends up being a substantive competitor that some people end up using? Do you think that there's such a need for this abstraction layer that's independent of models and finishing the last percentage of the work that needs to be done? Bring it on. That's good. Seriously, what would you say? It doesn't matter what I think. I determined together with the team to be the global ubiquitous category leader. That's why we're here in the States. That's why we are investing in capabilities beyond what the models naturally will ever work on. I think it's this question of if you were a database company and AWS decided, hey, we're going to offer a similar database on AWS. If that was the only thing you were offering, you were toast. You went out of business. But there were lots of things that AWS did and naturally wanted to build. I think Anthropic, and OpenAI, and Gemini, and Google, it will be the same thing. Another spea hole set of things that they don't want to necessarily focus on as much. But I think what's fascinating is just having this, like you said, almost the low ego to, cloud skills comes up for contracts. That was maybe a core part of the product 12, 18 months ago, but we're in a completely different place. It helped us get to where we are. The interesting thing is we've always wanted to work on the most complex legal work. The reality is that the more we move up market, the less standard things are. We work with this amazing pharmaceutical company. They do a ton of M&A. The way that they do that is very unstructured. It's very different every single time. All of the data is super unstructured. There's so many things you just need to go and do, which I think is our opportunity. I guess in another flavor of this, I feel like VCs are increasingly excited about these AI-nabled services plays. There's been a bunch of these like, "Oh, we can build a law firm from scratch and make it AI first." It's another way to potentially capture value here or play this trend. What do you make of some of those approaches? Obviously, we haven't decided to do that. We've always been very clear in our strategy that we're a software provider. We are not the service provider. I think the thing that I would find difficult building one of those companies is why shouldn't a firm like Kirkland just offer something like that that's empowered by AI under the hood and they leverage LaGoura or goodwin or one of the other great firms in Europe. The idea that you could build a completely AI-nate service law firm from the ground up and beat the big guys that have all the distribution, well, maybe, but I'm a betting man and I haven't betted anything on that. I also want to switch over to LaGoura, the company, and obviously you're running now a massive business, you know, in a sane scale, growing quickly. One thing I think is so interesting is just the extent to which these AI companies are similar and different from the software companies that have come before. I'm sure you've talked to many CEOs of more classic SaaS businesses. I wonder what parts feel different? I definitely challenge the executives at LaGoura who have had amazing rocket ship journeys before. But then you realize that even if those companies did tremendously well, they scaled a lot slower than LaGoura. People show up from Clarna or Vanta or Brace and these are really good companies and they scale really quickly. But what they did in a year, we now have to do in a quarter. I do think it requires a different way of operating, which is you also need to lead from the front on this AI stuff, right? You cannot expect everybody in the team to lean in on optimizing their own workflows if you're not doing that as a leader. And I coach people on that a lot. I think I challenge them. I think you have a bias to action. You joke about it. We just do-- An understatement. Yeah, yeah. But I guess philosophically, I think this is a little bit of a mindset thing that exists in early stage businesses for sure is don't let perfect be the enemy of good, like keep moving. And I think you've been able to maintain that culture at scale and just keep moving forward. And even when we were renaming the business, you're like, hey, listen, if you have any objections, let me know. Otherwise, we're doing this in the next 24 hours or something. And it was like, we're just going to be decisive and keep going forward. How have you been able to maintain that culture at scale? And how do you think about decisions? There's Jeff Bezos, one way, two way doors, like decisions that you want to go through? So coming off the back of this fundraise, we worked really hard to bring together the best group of investors I could ever imagine. But now I feel done with it. I want to go back to building. And so I actually plan on going back to Stockholm after the week here and just like planting myself in the middle of the work and like lead from the front on all of this stuff. Because I do think that if I'm not and if other leaders are not doing that all the time, the problem we have is half the people have a 10 year of like less than three months. Right? And so they have zero context on the two, three years that got us here. And so you need all the culture carriers and the people who were here for the two first years to be very vocal and very visible and show that moving fast is okay. But now we also have much bigger customers. Like, yeah, it was really easy to move fast when we were surveying a bunch of half-sized clients. But now we serve like a double-digit number of the top 50 law firms in the world. And we serve some of the top 10 banking institutions in the world. And they also expect another type of enterprise software cadence. So I think it's balancing that. But I frankly also think that the CIOs and CTOs and some of these organizations that we're selling into, they are optimizing for safe. Right? Like, they are optimizing for their own comfort where the reality is they should be optimizing for their speed and our speed. Like, it's actually good that we deprecate some stuff. Because we're building the next generation of tooling that's going to help them win. And if I could do a shout out or an ask, it would actually be to all of our clients to be a bit more willing to like drop the thing that worked for the thing that's going to get them to the next stage. Which we are also incentivized to build for them. Right? I think the thing is we only win if our clients win. And so there's like no part of us that doesn't want them to to succeed and do really well. And some of them have been amazing to work with and they really get that. And then some are really strangling to this sort of old idea of doing things. >> Yeah, I mean I think whether that's been interesting from the start as I feel, you know, we were talking earlier about how kind of a classic software company comes in with like their 12, 18 month product roadmap and they sit down with the CAO and go through that. And you know, you guys are so good at just constantly experimenting and throwing things and seeing what works and seeing what doesn't. I think a lot of companies right now are trying to figure out like how do we get the right to go do that almost with our customers? What have you learned about that, you know, over the course of the business? >> So that's a good question. I'm very honest. Like I, I was on this great call last week with a very big firm in Texas. And it was the partner and the executive team. And the partner is like 75. And he's like maxed. Wow, you know, implementing this AI stuff sounds like a lot of work. Do you honestly think like if I'm 75, like should I like lean in and do this or should I just retire? And like should I should I just do something else? And I'm like, well, like I showed him like like some use cases. And I was like, does this excite you? And he's like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. And I was like, well, that's the energy. You need to bring to the entire fucking firm. Let's go. And I think you need to just like move with a pedigree which is you show up and you say, hey, we don't have all the answers, but this is our only job. And we've done 800 of these deployments. We've learned a thing or two. This stuff works, this doesn't work. We think the world is headed here. And because we think the world is headed here, we're gonna make these decisions. If you subscribe to that worldview, we want you on our team. And we want you in the La Gora tent. And it's a great tent. Like the music is good, we've got great beer, we've got really smart engineers. And we're gonna make sure that everybody in the tent has a really great time and that everybody gets home by the end of the night. But if you don't be part of that tent, that's also fine. I'm sure there's another okay party down the street. But like when you're invited into the tent, we are going to be very honest. And we're gonna say this is working, this is not working. This is what we want to go do. This is what we want to get your permission to go do. And I think that many of the buyers in our industry has never met a more ambitious team. And they're like, wow, we've never met somebody who's so energized about selling legal technology. I'm like, yes, but it's not about selling legal technology. It's about transitioning your entire teams to being completely AI native. And it's gonna be the most exciting work transformation that's happened since the web. And I was not even born in time for the internet. So I get to experience this for the first time. How does that inform who you hire? You talked about the tent on the customer side as well. But like where do the key characteristics that you look for for people to bring on to look for? We want people who are really collaborative and competitive. Because I want our team to fight for our clients and if they lose a deal, because they didn't pitch like a good enough AI story for a particular case, then like frankly, falls on us. Because if they make another $5 million, some of that is gonna trickle down to us someday. And we wanna really be their partner in the long term. But then we also need people who are gonna lean in and say, okay, well, you aren't there yet. I'm gonna help you get there. So we were early to really pioneer this group of legal engineers. The legal engineers are the glue in LaGuara. They're not only the glue, but they're also like the, they're the buddies. So when you get into the tent, somebody comes like, hey, amazing that you're here. Do you wanna beer? And they like, keep an eye on you during the night. And they are expractitioners. So they've practiced laws, law, and they have felt the pain at like firsthand. And now this exciting technology shows up and they can reinvent the work together with the firms that use to work with and new firms. And they also get to get elevated in their careers. - How do you think about like what areas of the business to think about from a first principle standpoint versus what areas of the business to just accept? Hey, this is the way businesses are run. And I give a lot of leeway to XX to like run the different parts of the company as they wanna run them. But then when everybody gets into the executive, weekly meeting, we're their team LaGuara. Like you never show up and represent marketing. You never show up and represent engineering. You're optimizing globally for the company. And I think right now we have a very good mix of being there done that since scale, knows how to operate a big company and organize a hundred people to get shit done. And then AI native, like high IQ, doesn't respect authority people. Like I think I see it too, it's like a great example. (laughing) Jake, and I think the combination really works because then you can sort of, if you just question somebody enough, like they start to realize themselves why something doesn't make sense. And then if you create a room and a group of high trust, then things are easy. - You mentioned this kind of like the planning two quarters ahead. I'm curious like as you reflect back on the product that you built up over the last year, how much of that feels, there's a North Star that you kind of a year ago, you would have been like, yeah, it's kind of where I would have expected the LaGoura product to be. Or how much of it is kind of almost opportunistic and so far as like, oh, the models can now do X or we're seeing Y from our customers. - So I think it was a big shift actually in December of last year. When we all went on Christmas break and we played around with, Opus 4.5 and 4.6, like that was a big unlock. Was there like a moment for you? - Yeah, like I, you know, when you tell the agent to do something and then you're like, oh, fuck, I forgot to add the context. And like now it's not gonna figure out. And then it goes, oh, yeah, but you need to, you forgot to give me this file. So like I can't do it. And you're like, oh, you're right, I didn't forget that. And you're like, give it in and you're running, it works. And if you look into the internal thinking, it also like goes, huh, Max did not give me a file here. Hmm, why didn't you do that? Maybe he's trying to see if I can figure it out anyways. Or maybe I'll just ask him for it. And it goes like, can't please give it. And you give it in the works. I think that like, it feels like a more human interaction in a way. And it feels like there's less friction being added between like me getting a lot of value and the system knowing what to do. And it's decreasing at like a exponential pace. And I think the tough thing is, once you've had one of those experiences, how do you then think about bringing that into your domain and your realm? So one of the other reasons why I think we need to be a-inative across the entire stack of the company is, we're gonna draw great inspiration from what's possible in engineering or marketing to what we can bring to legal. I think the biggest challenge now is in software engineering, it's very easy to have an agent go out and do some work and then give you a pull request where he wants to submit some code to the main repo. In professional services, like the UX of collaborating with agents on particular projects or matters in our world is less unclear. So there's like more of the stack and the system around the agents that needs to be built. So you come back from December break, you're like, okay, Opus 4546, like these are incredible models. How do you actually then tag, like do you just completely change the course of like, what the team's working on or how do you kind of balance this continuity versus like whipsaw feeling of craziness in AI? - Yeah, so I think that's a good question. And probably something that we're balancing a bit. I don't think that has a binary answer, but I almost go back to this fact of you need a team that's reliant and low ego, who's willing to say, okay, that's now the world. And we will operate under those boundaries. And we're gonna run at an intensity that is practically unheard of and we hope that will take us right. - Yeah, like I think you can build stuff like the Google model where like, okay, all the different things are like super empowered and there's no top down at all. And then you just like hope that people figure out cool stuff and like go do them. And that kind of works there 'cause you have infinite distribution anyway. But in our world, we need to be very crisp. I'm like, this is what we're building. This is the expectations our clients have and this is what we're going to deliver by when. And then you need to get the entire company to. hit the ores at the same time. >> One question, the product development life cycle and interactions with customers historically was, you know, one of the old things was you would sit down and see how people did their work and then you'd figure out where there's potential workflow or tools that could be built alongside that. Today, obviously, the customer in the same way doesn't know what's possible. And so you're living on the edge of the models and it's a little bit back to the, like old Steve Jobs adage of like the customer doesn't know what they want, I'm gonna show them. I'm curious, like as these models are improving, how do you balance maybe what the customers are asking for with what the capabilities exist and how you meet those together? >> So it's a really good question and you can almost add one other Pizzo nuance into it, which is, are you buying for the, or are you building for the CIO or the partner who's the buyer, or are you building for the end user? And I think historically at least in 2024 and maybe early 2025, it was a lot about building the stuff that would sort of get us into the door. Because we showed up, I mean, similar to RAM, and you already had Brex here and you had to show up and be better. And we took the time to really refine a lot of the foundational building blocks, which I'm happy that we did. And you don't wanna get stuck in incrementalism. But I do think you wanna have a lot of iterations. So I think iterating, iterating, and having incremental improvements are like different things. So I think I'm optimizing for like iteration cycles. And then you need to be able to insert like bold ideas and go, okay, now we've suddenly crossed some threshold which will allow us to rethink X. How do we make ourselves get the time to explore that? So we have an R&D function, which is super. But also I think all of the engineers are continuously pushing that 'cause they're like doing some work on getting this feature over the line. But at the same time, they have like a crazy idea and they get to go explore that. - Have you internalized like enough of the customers or potential customers' pain points that you're able to see what the technology is able to do? And then you can translate that to what the customer would want. Or do you have a small group of people and you're like, hey, this is now possible with Opus 4.6, like what do you think of this? Like how does that cycle come work? - So I think we've always been really good at knowing, or at finding out what the new models unlock. And we do that partly through just like a lot of evals and then hiring a lot of amazing lawyers who get to work with our product team and our engineering team. And so we have this group of 70 to 100 legal engineers who are like the most savvy users of our product. We took this very hard task in capital markets, for instance. And we just looked at, okay, well, what if we put one of our engineers and one of our lawyers together for a week? Can they get something? I was like, yeah, it was amazing, so good. It costs like 500 bucks to run, 'cause there's so many cycles on it, but it's amazing like the results that it produces. And then you need to figure out, okay, can we generalize that into something that can work for more use cases? Because we serve capital markets and finance and you know, M&A and litigation and in-house. And so you need to get more, we're not like a capital market solution. But yes, I would say where people internally with a lot of tests and knowledge about what we would like to solve next if we could get there. And then you just take the new model so you throw out the problem and see if it works. So I mean, obviously a big focus of this round is, you know, you guys are tripling, quadrupling down on the US. Yes. What does that look like over the next few years? It is all in. We opened in New York last March. And we've also opened in Denver. And we have an amazing team there. And we've just opened in Chicago and we've opened in Houston and we have lots more hubs coming this year. And what we are doing is we're saying the legal market happens globally, but there are a few central hubs where most of the work happens. And you know, it's in the US. And the product has always been able to sort of internationalize between all jurisdictions because we started in Sweden. And I think the entire legal, you know, Swedish legal market is smaller than Kirkland and Alice. And so you sort of had to flex that muscle very, very early on. And now we're really starting to see is that we're driving value on both sides of the equations of both on the in-house side and the law firm side. And so now that we've sort of fully landed in the States, we're starting to work with the big law firms but also the big private equity firms and the big pharmaceutical companies and the banks. And this is starting to create a real network flywheel for us where we are really starting to become ubiquitous. Legal work is synonymous to working on LaGora just as doing design work is synonymous to, well, you're gonna open Figma. And that feeling is very enchanting and very exciting. And it makes us feel the blood smock to quote the Swedish article that translated what I said in Swedish to English and then it sounded like we're all vampires. (laughing) It's an internal, internal, what happened there? So I did this article or interview in Swedish and there's a saying in Swedish that you can wake up with a blue spot and blue spot is like, well, you're so excited that you can like taste the blood. You're so excited that you can taste the blood. And she, the reporter, translated the article from Swedish to English before she published it and the headline was, the LaGora founder wakes up with a metallic taste of blood in his mouth and it was like a big picture of me and everybody sent that around internally and then it became this slang, blue smock and the Americans in the team, they love it. They're like, I'm working up early for this big deal and I'm gonna fly to SF at 6 a.m. #Bloodsmock. (laughing) - What do you think on the US expansion? I mean, it's crazy to think 15 months ago, we sort of had the discussion. It was in December of 24 about like how hard to push in the US and your answer was-- - And some of the things that was ever really a discussion from that. - Well, it was kind of a discussion of the sequencing of it. It was like, hey, we should go now or not at all and you were like, what do you mean? Like what kind of question is that, right? I guess in coming to the US and doing it as well as you have, what elements have you brought from the culture that exists in Stockholm that you think has served you so well? And like what are the things that you feel like you guys have gotten right to be able to capture the market as well as you have? - So first off, we made a rule which was that we're not going to open and hire in the US until we can serve and work with two of the best firms in the market. Like we need to get two good customers from Sweden and London. So I'm a real local at the source in New York to Orlando, airplane, after that semester. But that was our rule and both Cleary Gottlieb, which is an amazing, Wall Street firm and Goodwin and Proctor started working with us and we were able to serve them and they're sort of 2,000 plus lawyers each from Sweden with a lot of flights back and forth. Shout out to Gem who did all those late flights. And when we had that wind in our back, we said, okay, we're ready to open the office and we're going to go hard. And the most important thing for me was to create one the Gora feeling. If you walk into any Gora office around the globe, it's like one feeling. So I implanted myself here. I sent Robin who was our first lawyer to New York and he's been here more than Sweden probably. And over the summer, we all came here because Europe took a break. And so we just rented a big Airbnb and everybody came from Lugora and we just worked in the office and it was amazing. And now I think the New York Lugora culture is maybe even more like Cora, Gora, what we were, you know, a year ago. Metallic blood. Yeah, you know, when we were like 100 people, now we were 250 in Stockholm. Like it was even more like that. And so I think people, getting people here for sure, but also we still do the onboarding since Stockholm. Everybody in New York has to come to Stockholm for the onboarding period. And so I do think we do a really good job of creating that unanimous culture and feeling. And, you know, we've been very upfront with the fact that we're five days in office, we have dinner together every day and it's like you subscribe to that. And our competition doesn't do that. And I think that that gives us a real advantage. I draw this analogy of once upon a time like 15 years ago, you guys wouldn't have been able to catch up and exceed a competitor. because the infrastructure was kind of flat and it was all within your own control. But now you have you building on top of something else that's building. And so the point of time you're moving towards is just an exponent. And so your declines expectation and what you're able to deliver just changes so materially every month, every quarter. And so the culture of being in the office and just like wanting it more, it feels like that manifests itself for the end customers. >> Yeah, 100%. And when they come over to our office, they feel that. And I think when you enter, like now with our investment in the US, more and more of the center of gravity from an executive point of view is also New York, both with our CRO Patrick and our CFO David being here. And when you walk into any of the offices, I think that excitement like draws with you, right? And so many times I've asked people to show up on a Friday 'cause I know the team is gonna do their demos where like everybody in engineering shows what they built on the last two weeks. And people feel like they're stepping into a time machine like to their old, you know, the existing companies when they were moving that fast. The thing is we're able to maintain that as we are 400 people and not just 40 anymore. >> We have some quick hitters here. I guess one that's a little bit of a segue into this. But recently financial times in article that you guys were prominently featured in, just about the Stockholm startup ecosystem. >> Yeah, what's in the water over there? >> Yeah, honestly, what is it? We talked about the culture bringing it over here, but what do you think is unique that you've been able to capture? >> So there's lots of great technical talent. Everybody gets like a laptop early and it's part of the school curriculum. I also think that we at least have a couple of good role models like WSIS, Spotify, WSIS Guide, and you know, Clorna to some extent. And it's like, okay, that's really exciting. Like, how hard can it be? Typical mentality. And we are also very Americanized as a culture. We only subscribe to American news shows. And I remember watching Silicon Valley and I was like, wow, that sounds really cool. And now I feel like I'm in like one of those scenes like every day. >> Yeah, it is. Like a lot of it is. I couldn't watch it. It was just like a documentary. >> Yeah, I worked during the day. I don't need to watch it at night. >> Yeah, yeah. But like I do think it's a maybe lack of respect for authority and like how hard can it be kind of thing. And then also we just like using the latest stuff ourselves. Right? I think it's like a very pro tech society. >> Yeah. What's one thing you've like changed your mind on in the AI world in the last year? >> So I didn't think that the world of, like I think cloud bot or multiple or whatever it's called these days. >> Like Bing Claw? >> Yeah. >> Open Claw. I think that came sooner than I expected. And like the models ability to do work for a long period of time. And then being like right on the money when it finishes. I think that surprised me. And I've changed my mind as to how quickly we should move in into the world of just having agents to work on our behalf. >> Yeah. >> Well Max, I'm sure a bunch of folks will want to pull on threads that we talked about in this conversation and learn more. So I want to leave them like to you. Where can folks get to learn more about you? Lagora.com/careers or slash book of demo? >> Well Max, I am confident that in 10 months when we inevitably have you on again, it'll be an even crazier next thing. But I mean, just a huge congratulations on everything since. >> It will be great. We also need a new so-future like. >> Yeah, exactly. >> We'll keep care of the trend. >> We'll keep, but it'll be completely different. >> You keep performing and we can afford a nicer. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Okay, well, okay. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Awesome. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)