Moritz Raises $9M for Full-Stack AI Law Firm
Moritz (moritzlegal.com), an AI-native law firm that pairs proprietary software with experienced attorneys to handle legal work at a fraction of Big Law prices, has raised $9 million in seed funding. The round was backed by 20VC, Y Combinator, Urban Innovation Fund, Inception Fund, Pioneer Fund, Rice Capital, Illusian, Rebel Fund, and Lenny Rachitsky, along with more than 20 unicorn founders from companies like Dropbox, Reddit, Instacart, and Hugging Face.
The oversubscribed round closed in just four days, first reported as an exclusive by Business Insider. The full angel roster also includes founders of Superhuman, WorkOS, Runway, Mixpanel, Rappi, Scribd, Supermetrics, Privy, Optimizely, Product Hunt, and Google Photos, alongside operators from ElevenLabs, Lovable, and OpenAI.
Cofounder Pamir Ehsas is a lawyer and former outside counsel to OpenAI and Google, while Stefan Mandaric is an AI engineer and ex-Fulbright scholar at MIT. The company, formerly known as Arcline, went through Y Combinator's W26 batch.
The pair initially set out to build software that lawyers could use to work faster, but found the traditional billable-hour model gave firms little incentive to adopt tools that made them more efficient. Unlike other legal AI startups such as Legora and Harvey, Moritz doesn't sell software to law firms but has become an AI-enabled law firm itself. Last September, the founders scrapped their existing contracts and restarted the company as a full-service firm.
The model works like this: Moritz handles legal work the same day, at a fraction of the market price, with AI doing 80% of the work so clients pay lawyers for only the final 20%. Over 50 contracted co-counsel lawyers finalize the work. Those attorneys come from firms like Fenwick, Cooley, and Goodwin. Moritz charges flat, upfront fees rather than hourly rates.
Since launching in early 2026, Moritz has supported over 100 companies, closing deals representing more than $2 billion in aggregate contract value across the US, Europe, and Australia, with an average turnaround of four hours.
The company focuses on commercial, corporate, and employment work, and excludes litigation, immigration, and tax — areas the team considers less suited to automation.
"We are fully accountable. Maximum accountability for every word, redline, and piece of advice," Ehsas told Business Insider.
That accountability is a distinguishing factor and a risk. Unlike legal software vendors that disclaim responsibility for AI errors, Moritz takes on full attorney liability for its output. If something goes wrong, the firm is on the hook.
The founders had initially aimed to raise just $3 million before investor demand tripled the round. According to Business Insider, Ehsas and Mandaric had received interest from more than 200 investors heading into Demo Day, but chose to cap the institutional side and fill the rest with a curated set of angel investors.
The raise reflects growing investor appetite for startups that don't just sell tools to professional services firms but compete with them directly. In legal, where companies spend hundreds of billions annually on outside counsel, that opportunity is especially large.