Qura stands out by a ‘wide margin’ in its class, Legora CEO Max Junestrand said.

Swedish legal AI company Legora has acquired Qura, a Stockholm-based AI-native legal research start-up. Details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The acquisition comes just a month after Legora announced a $550m Series D, taking it to a valuation of $5.55bn.

AI is permeating into nearly all sectors across enterprise and administration, and the legal field is not an exception.

Start-ups such as the Irish and UK-based TrialView, Norwegian legal-tech Newcode, and much bigger companies including Harvey and Clio are all making platforms that target legal professionals with research and business management.

Legora – formerly known as Leya – is behind a collaborative AI platform for legal work which supports lawyers in research, review and drafting across complex matters.

The 2023-founded start-up said Qura will help further develop Legora’s collaborative AI platform for legal professionals.

Qura’s team is set to join Legora’s existing legal research organisation and to expand their approach to larger markets, including the US. Legora already serves more than 1,000 law firms across the world, it said.

“Legal research will be a cornerstone of the legal AI stack, and Qura has built one of the most impressive foundations in the world,” said Max Junestrand, the CEO and co-founder of Legora said.

“We evaluated legal research start-ups globally and Qura stood out by a wide margin. Their ability to combine deep legal understanding with truly AI-native infrastructure is exceptional.”

Training data for legal research is harder to come by given that much of it is not public, and thereby accessible for the AI model. Even with access, the complexity of law and jurisdictional nuance makes accurate reasoning extremely challenging, the company explained.

“Most attempts at AI legal research fall short because they rely on unstructured data and shallow retrieval techniques,” said Adrian Parlow, the vice-president of product at Legora.

“Qura has solved the hardest part – structuring legal information in a way that AI can reason over it reliably.

“If AI is the car, their data infrastructure is the road system. It enables safe, accurate navigation instead of guesswork. Integrating this into Legora’s platform unlocks a step-change in what legal AI can do.”

Arvid Winterfeldt, Qura’s CEO added: “From day one, our ambition at Qura has been to rethink legal research from first principles. We’ve built a system that doesn’t just retrieve legal information but understands it in context.”

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