Exclusive: Danish Legal Research Startup Pandektes Raises €13.5M Series A
October 5, 2026 - 5:49 am
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 diehard conviction that we could build a better and new way to do legal research, said Casper Laursen, CEO and co-founder of Pandektes.
The law is spread across millions of documents in many different places, and finding the right one takes lawyers a lot of time. For decades, a handful of publishers have done that work for them, and in most European countries, lawyers have had little choice but to pay for it.
In early 2023, Casper Laursen and Søren Brokær set out to change that with Pandektes, a tool that gathers these documents, organizes them, and helps lawyers quickly find what they need. Even though many of the lawyers they pitched to warned them off, and neither founder had ever practiced law, they still pursued the idea.
There was general skepticism about the technology’s capabilities and possibilities in early 2023, they told us. Three and a half years later, Pandektes has more than 500 customers and has just raised €13.5M. Munich-based Alstin Capital led the Series A, joined by PROfounders, Scale Capital, and existing investors.
The raised capital will help the Copenhagen-based company expand from Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland into more of Europe and North America. "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 told us in an exclusive interview.
There were good reasons for the lawyers to be cautious, as in most European countries, it has long been the case that a single provider is the standard means of accessing the law, whether it is LexisNexis, Westlaw, Beck, or Karnov. Pandektes contends that this has made it costly to switch away from them, even as prices have continued to rise.
Coming from outside the profession made the early months harder still. Trust came more slowly than it would have for insiders, they said. The technology was a hard sell too, because in early 2023, many lawyers were still unsure what large language models could really do.
From the outside, however, the founders could see something the industry had grown used to. Most law is public, but gathering it from thousands of sources and keeping it reliable enough for court had always needed large editorial teams. Laursen and Brøkær believed AI could take on much of that work and give lawyers a far stronger base to search from. Working out how to make it fit each area of law took countless conversations with practitioners.
For most companies, the first customer is the most special one. And their first customer arrived with a familiar problem. Pandektes helped from day one, and the customer returned the favor with a steady stream of feedback. More than three years on, it still uses the platform. "They’re still a customer with us to this day, more than 3 years later. We’re really proud of that. This organization spent a lot of time researching procedural matters and had a heavy burden of knowledge sharing between seniors and juniors." "Pandektes added value there from day one, they provided a lot of feedback, and they’ve been happy users ever since," said Casper Laursen.