Swedish startup Legora hits US$12.5 billion valuation after fast revenue growth

Legora, a Swedish legal AI startup, has raised new funding at a US$12.5 billion valuation. The round was announced on Thursday. Airtree, an investor in the company, put money in just seven months earlier at a US$5.6 billion valuation, so the valuation has more than doubled in that time.

The growth in revenue behind it has been quick. According to Vullinghs, Legora reached US$100 million in annual recurring revenue within 18 months, then hit US$200 million six months after that.

The text also touches on another Airtree-backed founder, Kroonenburg, who built the education company A Cloud Guru and has now started Cuttable, a digital advertising business. The piece offers several plausible reasons why his second venture is moving faster: his business skills may have sharpened after building a successful company, or digital advertising may be a hotter theme than education. Kroonenburg himself puts it down largely to artificial intelligence.

He recalls that it took six years to go from him and his brother working in spare rooms at home to a unicorn with a multibillion-dollar valuation and 600 employees. He says Cuttable is growing more than twice as fast as A Cloud Guru did.

For the Nordic AI scene, Legora's numbers are a marker of how quickly an AI application company from the region can scale and how fast investors are repricing such businesses. The remarks from Kroonenburg point the same way, with AI cited as the main driver of faster growth.