Key Facts
- Max Junestrand is co-founder and CEO of Legora, a Stockholm-based company building AI tools for lawyers.
- He spoke at Wave by Vento in Turin on Thursday during a session titled The Compounding Bet.
- Junestrand said sovereignty in enterprise applications, consumer apps, or the software layer is an excuse for companies not bold enough to compete globally.
- He said sovereignty matters for energy, defence, and infrastructure, but enterprise software buyers have offices in Europe, the US, and Asia, so a sovereign product does not make sense for them.
- Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, president and managing director of General Catalyst, argued for sovereignty lower in the stack.
- Zu Fürstenberg said services make up 70% of Europe's GDP, AI is starting to replace some of that work, and Europe needs its own energy and compute clusters or value will leave.
- She described the goal as preventing an involuntary transfer of wealth from Europe to the US or elsewhere.
- At the same event on Wednesday, Alibaba's Joe Tsai said open source is Europe's only way to AI independence.
- In September, Junestrand said Europe should not build a frontier lab of its own.
- Junestrand said the top player in software tends to take about 90% of a market, and legal AI will have one worldwide winner rather than one winner per region.
- Legora's closest rival, Harvey, closed a $550m round at a $15.6bn valuation in September.
- Junestrand said lawyers give a product only one chance, and in mid-2024 Legora paused its sales push to make sure the product was good enough.
- Law firms are under pressure because work that took 10 hours now takes one, which hurts firms that bill by the hour.
- Legora uses several AI models because each is strong at different things; a Claude model is very good at drafting, and an OpenAI model is good at fact-checking.
- Legora had about $1m in revenue in October 2024, reached $100m in under 18 months, and reached $200m in under six more months.
- Junestrand said it will reach $300m after more than 50% growth each quarter for about two years.
- The company started the year with 200 people and 22 sales staff, and plans to have 300 sales staff by the end of the year.
- The median time people have been at the company is three to four months.
- Each hire needs sign-off from a culture carrier outside the hiring team, an idea Legora took from Amazon.
- Legora's new chief financial officer had seen a company grow from $30m to $300m in four years; Junestrand said Legora is doing that in four quarters.
- Junestrand ranks Legora's investors. Every two months, he sends them a leaderboard of how many customer introductions each has made.
- One investor that had put $150m into a round came second to last, then made 50 introductions in two weeks.
- Legora has just opened an office in Milan. Italy has more lawyers per person than anywhere else in Europe.
Software sovereignty as an excuse
Max Junestrand, co-founder and chief executive of Legora, used his appearance at Wave by Vento in Turin to push back against a phrase that has become common in European technology policy. He told the audience that sovereignty in enterprise applications, consumer apps, or the software layer is an excuse for companies that are not bold enough to compete globally. The enterprise layer and the software layer, he said, are the global market. That argument cuts against a growing political appetite for European alternatives in cloud computing, productivity software, and artificial intelligence. For Junestrand, the problem with sovereign software is not that Europe lacks talent or ambition. It is that the customers for enterprise software are already global. They have offices in Europe, the United States, and Asia. A product built only for one region would not serve them. A sovereign product, he said, does not really make any sense at all for such buyers.
The session, titled The Compounding Bet, was led by Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, president and managing director of General Catalyst, an investor in Legora. Legora is based in Stockholm and builds AI tools for lawyers. Junestrand said the company's market was global from day one. That decision was not an afterthought. It shaped the product, the sales motion, and the pace of hiring. While many European startups begin with a domestic base and then expand, Legora treated the world as its addressable market from the start. The approach reflects Junestrand's broader view that software companies should not use sovereignty as a reason to stay small. In his telling, the software layer is one of the few parts of the economy where the winner can come from anywhere, as long as the product is good enough and the company is willing to sell everywhere.
Where the value goes
Zu Fürstenberg offered a different emphasis. She made the case for sovereignty lower down the stack. Services make up 70% of Europe's GDP, she said, and AI is starting to replace some of that work. If Europe does not build its own energy and compute clusters, she warned, the value created by that transition will leave the continent. Her concern is not about apps or enterprise software interfaces. It is about the physical and computational foundations that make AI possible. Data centers, energy supply, and compute capacity are strategic assets. If they are owned or controlled elsewhere, Europe may find itself paying for its own productivity gains in ways that benefit other economies. Zu Fürstenberg described the goal as locking down part of what otherwise would look like an involuntary transfer of wealth from Europe to the US or elsewhere in the world. That phrase captures a central anxiety in European industrial policy: the fear that the continent will generate demand and talent but capture little of the