Our investment in Pandektes: Building the single source of truth for law

Legal information is one of the most fundamental forms of infrastructure a society has, and for decades access to it has sat with very few providers. 

That is why we have invested in Pandektes, a Copenhagen company building technology that collects, structures and connects that information so lawyers, companies and public institutions can find and understand the law faster. The investment is part of a €13.5 million Series A round led by Alstin Capital, with PROfounders, People Ventures and other existing investors also participating, and the capital will fund international expansion, a larger team and the opening of more of its infrastructure to other developers.

Pandektes was founded by Casper Laursen and Søren Brokær, and passed 500 customers within two years of launching its platform. Its users include law firms, companies and public institutions in Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.

Public law in the hands of a few

Almost everything a lawyer works with is public. Legislation, judgments and administrative decisions are published by courts and authorities, but they come from thousands of separate sources, each with its own format, language and update cycle, and very little of it was ever built to be read by a machine.

Turning all of that into something searchable and keeping it up to date used to require large editorial teams working by hand. That cost is why, for decades, providers such as LexisNexis, Westlaw, Beck and Karnov became the default gateway to the law in their markets, and why those markets settled into high switching costs and steadily rising prices. 

Pandektes was built on the view that technology has improved enough to change that. Its platform collects and connects legal sources automatically, at a scale that used to depend on manual editorial work, while legal experts focus on judgment and quality control. Lawyers get answers with every source linked and open to checking. Underneath sits a structured, continuously maintained body of legal data, and that is the real asset. The research tool is the first product built on it.

Revenue has grown sixfold in the past year for Pandektes, and around two thirds of the organisations that trial the platform become customers, many of them cancelling their incumbent licences entirely. That last figure is the one we watched most closely. Giving up a database a firm has relied on for twenty years is a big decision, and Pandektes' customers are making it.

Why we invested

A society built on the rule of law depends on people being able to find and understand the law. We believe the company that owns and maintains the structured legal data underneath will shape how legal work is done in the years ahead, and Pandektes has shown that such a company can be built from Copenhagen.

The next step is opening that data to others. Pandektes wants legal AI companies, and anyone else building legal technology, to work from the same structured legal information, and more than 100 organisations have joined the waitlist for its API before it has even been announced. Casper, Søren and the team have already taken the platform from Denmark into Germany and Switzerland, and this round gives them the capital to go further.