David Eckstein, CFO of Legora, joins us on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the company’s latest $550 million funding round, led by Excel Partners at a $5.5 billion valuation. With incredible global demand for legal AI, Legora is expanding rapidly, growing from 200 to 800 customers across more than 50 countries in just one year. The U.S. market has become Legora’s largest revenue driver, with top-tier law firms like Goodwin, Cleary Gottlieb, Cooley, and Debevoise adopting its AI-powered solutions. Eckstein shares how the legal sector is embracing AI, with adoption now integrated into critical workflows, and how Legora balances aggressive global scaling with disciplined financial management. With $750 million in the bank post-Series C, the company is poised to expand its U.S. workforce to over 300 and global headcount to 900, driving transformative change in legal services worldwide.
Get the latest news and updates on FINTECH.TV
Joining the broadcast at this hour, David Eckstein is the CFO at the aforementioned Legora.
He joins us now down here on the trading floor of the big board.
Welcome and congratulations on all the success.
Thank you, JD.
Thanks for having me.
Let's start there with that last headline that we just brought our viewers.
Talk to me about what this now allows the firm to do that maybe you could not quite do before.
We were seeing unbelievable demand in this round.
We had over a billion dollars of demand.
We're seeing incredible conviction for legal AI.
The world is changing around these new workflows, and legal AI space is broader than the $40 billion in legal services.
It actually touches all $1 trillion in the human services space.
And so investors leaned in and we're very excited to welcome.
Excel Partners who led this $550 million round at a $5.5 billion valuation, and we're also welcoming back all of our existing investors including Benchmark, Vessemer, Redpoint, Iconic, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, as well as a dozen new investors including Airtree, Alkeon, Geodesic, Bankat Venture Partners, and the list goes on from there.
Yes, the firm is based in Sweden, but you are certainly a global enterprise to.
The least, what specifically are you seeing here in the United States market that most excites you right now here at home?
It's so funny because this round comes on the one year anniversary of our entrance to the US market, and in just one short year, the US has actually become our largest market by revenue.
And in that one year we've grown from 200 customers to 800 customers globally, from 20 countries to over 50 countries.
But the US market has something very special going on.
The second mover position that we're in is actually more powerful than the first mover advantage, and what we're seeing is very similar to what RAM did to Brex and Data Bricks is doing to Snowflake.
And we're benefiting from a number of big wins and rips, including Goodwin, uh, Cleary Gottlieb, Cooley, Debevoy, and it's just, it's just getting started.
Last year alone we saw 17.
X growth on the top line.
That's amazing, David.
Are you still seeing many legal firms sort of experiment with artificial intelligence, or in your expertise, have you already seen the adoption, like the real admittance that this is the future and now is the time to adopt a lot of these tools, even if many of them I'd imagine, had a healthy degree of skepticism to embrace these new AI-based tools.
We have seen a structural change in the way that these legal firms are adopting AI.
Uh, if you think about it, there's 600 million people every single day that depend on AI, and the Enterprise TA alone in the past year has grown 10x to over $50 billion.
We are beyond the chasm.
Uh, today, legal firms and internal, uh, uh, legal departments are embracing these new capabilities and working it into their critical workflows, and Lagora is the key platform that's driving this transformation.
Uh, before I let you go, from more of a financial perspective, how do you balance a.
Aggressive global scaling with a disciplined approach to overall growth.
Lagora has always been disciplined and will always continue to be disciplined.
The not well known secret is Lagora has burned very little cash.
To date, Lagora has burned less than $50 million and Lagora still has every single dollar of its Serie C in the bank, which means that Lagora has roughly $750 million in the bank post this round.
We have a lot.
Runway, we have a lot of cash to make very calculated, very disciplined decisions.
And so when we think about making these decisions, we always start out with an ROI.
What do we want to achieve?
How do we want to grow?
And as we think about this year in particular, we're going to be growing to over 300 headcount in the US.
We're already at 4 offices in the US and we're going to continue to expand.
We're going to grow our our total, uh, headcount around the world from 300 headcount to 900 headcount.
It comes down to making the right decisions and so we.
Benefit from some of the best in class metrics, including a 10 month payback period, a six-figure average contract value, and the list goes on from there.
But what got investors the most excited in this round is the user engagement, which has tripled since January and is on par with the amount of time spent writing emails every single day.
What I will tell you is we are just getting started.
David Eckstein, CFO at Legora, just getting started.
That's the way you end an interview, my man.
Thanks for being here.
Nice to have you.
Thank you.