Openlaw Secures $3.3 Million to Streamline European Legal Bureaucracy

Openlaw, a European platform dedicated to digital legal and notary infrastructure, recently announced the closing of a $3.3 million seed funding round. This investment is earmarked to support the development and expansion of its platform, beglaubigt.de, which aims to digitize and simplify complex company formation processes and notary procedures across Europe.

The funding round saw participation from prominent investors, including YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim (via Y Ventures), Moonfire Ventures (founded by Atomico co-founder Mattias Ljungman), Zeno Ventures, Combination VC, Orange Collective, and a group of angel investors. Among the latter are numerous Y Combinator alumni and founders with successful exits, underscoring market confidence in Openlaw's potential. The company itself was accepted into Y Combinator's F24 Batch.

Europe's Bureaucratic Labyrinth

While incorporating a company in the United States can take as little as 24 hours, the reality in Europe is vastly different. Here, founders face 27 distinct national legal systems and over 60 different corporate forms. In many of the continent's largest markets, including Germany, Spain, and France, company formation legally requires notarization. This fragmented and often outdated regulatory landscape represents a significant barrier to innovation and economic growth.

In Germany, for instance, setting up a GmbH (limited liability company) typically takes six to eight weeks. For founders, this translates into navigating a maze of agencies, forms, and procedures, with little clarity on what needs to happen, when, or where. This complexity is not limited to initial incorporation but extends to all subsequent phases, such as tax registration, commercial register entries, managing business addresses, and ongoing administration, which remain complex and fragmented across different jurisdictions.

Openlaw's Solution: beglaubigt.de

Openlaw steps into this scenario not to replace existing institutions, but to serve as a supportive digital infrastructure. Its mission is to guide founders from initial incorporation through to the day-to-day running of their business. The company began its journey in Germany, Europe's most bureaucratic market, via the beglaubigt.de platform, with the long-term ambition of expanding into additional European markets.

The beglaubigt.de platform digitizes the entire company formation process, from initial documents and notary appointments to commercial register entries and transparency register filings. What used to take eight weeks, beglaubigt.de reduces to as little as three days. The platform collaborates with approximately 300 notary offices on behalf of its customers, handling administration, scheduling, document preparation, and register filings, while legal counsel and notarization remain with the notaries. Less than a year after launch, beglaubigt.de counts established names like neobank Qonto, Holvi, and Sevdesk among its partners and has already served over 25,000 customers. The platform also offers Germany's first fully automated incorporation API, allowing founders to start the entire company formation process directly from their Qonto account, without ever leaving the platform.

Vision and Future Prospects

Openlaw was built by two founders who experienced Germany's bureaucratic formation process firsthand. Alexander Sporenberg, CEO and co-founder, was part of the founding team at Razor Group, which achieved "unicorn" status with a $1.7 billion valuation in just 15 months. His experience across hundreds of M&A deals showed him how notary appointments and red tape could become a significant bottleneck. Felix Gerlach, CPO, began his career in the Rocket Internet ecosystem before founding Passbase, a global identity verification platform, which was acquired in 2023.

Alexander Sporenberg emphasizes that Europe does not lack innovation or talent, but rather efficient infrastructure. "At Razor, we built a unicorn in 15 months, but waiting for notary appointments nearly derailed us. In the US, it would have taken days. That's exactly what we're solving with Openlaw, so European founders don't fail because of bureaucracy," says Sporenberg. With the fresh capital, Openlaw plans to expand the product offering of its German platform beglaubigt.de, beyond GmbH, UG, and GbR formations and tax-optimized holding structures, to include additional register processes and ongoing bookkeeping. The ultimate goal is to expand across Europe.