Pamir Ehsas spent years as outside counsel to OpenAI and other major tech companies, watching AI unfold from the front row while the legal industry ignored it entirely.
“I was advising companies building the most important technology of our generation. And I still couldn’t believe how slow and expensive the legal experience was. If it’s broken there, it’s broken everywhere,” he says.
So Ehsas left and built the firm he wished existed. Moritz, co-founded with Stefan Mandaric, a MIT-Fulbright scholar and engineer, has raised $9 million in an oversubscribed round that closed in four days.
Y Combinator and 20VC led the round, joined by Urban Innovation, Inception, and the founders of Reddit, Instacart, Dropbox, Gusto, Runway, Hugging Face, Supercell, WorkOS, Mixpanel, Cruise, Superhuman, and more than a dozen other unicorn-backed companies.
Initially, Ehsas and Mandaric aimed to raise $3 million from institutional investors and set up more than 200 VC meetings before Y Combinator’s Demo Day. But after hitting their goal on the first day, they cancelled most of the remaining meetings and chose to focus on bringing in operators instead of traditional investors.
In the legal market, companies spend hundreds of billions each year on outside counsel, but the client experience has barely changed in decades. Even though AI tools from companies like Legora, Harvey, LexisNexis, and Thomson Reuters are widely used, legal costs continue to rise.
Moritz operates as a law firm, competing with major firms on speed, price, and quality. Clients send in their legal matters and get a flat-fee quote right away. Moritz’s AI does most of the drafting and research, and then a network of over 50 lawyers reviews and approves the work.
The firm provides full attorney liability. On average, work is completed in four hours.
For example, Moritz recently drafted a $290 million master services agreement for a US financial services company in just 24 hours. The other side’s traditional law firm took four weeks to review the document. The contract was signed with only two minor changes.
In its first three months, Moritz helped over 100 companies in the US, Europe, and Australia close deals worth more than $2 billion. Its clients range from early-stage startups to public companies with large in-house legal teams.
The new funding will help Moritz expand its network of lawyers, enhance its AI-driven legal workflows, and expand into additional areas of law beyond commercial contracts.
TFN contacted Moritz for a comment on the diversity of its founding team.