Backing Vesence: Cursor for Lawyers

One could imagine a world of supercharged legal associates armed with AI tools that accelerate their work. Or perhaps highly interpersonal senior partners commanding agents of legal AIs? Or  Or perhaps companies just buy finished legal artefacts directly from legal AIs? With the rapid developments of LLMs and agents: who really knows.

That said, the future does start somewhere.

If you ask Henrik & Ludvig at Vesence, that somewhere is in Microsoft Word.

Taking a step back: Law is one of the most exciting opportunities for AI disruption - and if you visit law firms in Europe and the US they’re not getting caught on their heels. Law firms are leaning into AI, and are actively trying and testing every tool on the market.

So what work should Legal AI do first?

1. In law, attention to detail is everything. Firms charge high hourly rates for 100% work, not 99% - and definitely not 80%. The difference in a faulty reference or undefined term can be a failed acquisition or millions in liabilities. This nitty-gritty quality control work is what defines the late nights of junior lawyers - and even then the output is often wrong.

2. Lawyers live in MS Word. Lawyers’ source of truth is word documents. The same way that developers work in an Integrated Developer Environment (IDE), lawyers work in Word. Hence, Lawyers don’t want to leave Word to go into a workflow tool. Ripping Word out of Law is like ripping email out of Web 2.0.

3. Transactional firms do loads of repetitive quality control work that results from frankensteining together templates from previously used agreements, hundreds of versions of track changes between buyer and seller, and cascading cross-document updates.

These insights are what drove Vesence to build their first wedge: a Microsoft Word plugin for quality control for transactional law firms. It’s not sexy, but by meeting lawyers where they work, Vesence is rapidly winning over the hearts, and more importantly the trust, of lawyers globally. When you talk to their customers, their customers are prophets of the Vesence religion. That’s one heck of an MVP product!

Vesence believes that Microsoft Word is essentially an IDE for lawyers. By building in this structured environment on top of the Open XML standard - Vesence is able to employ an approach similar to Cursor: let lawyers apply AI in their work with little-to-no behavioral change. On top of these rails Vesence plans to then build the agentic future of legal work - at high fidelity.

At Creandum, we back great teams and products. What we saw in Markus Villig at Bolt when he wanted to build a European challenger to Uber, and Daniel Ek at Spotify when he wanted to re-write the music industry - is what we see in Henrik & Ludvig. 

1. They’re a first-principles product and founding team. 

2. They aren’t first-born into a market - but their product is born for the market. 

3. On top of this, they’re killer executors. 

Henrik & Ludvig are seasoned startup operators and have been a part of the original AI companies of Stockholm like Depict, Peltarion (acq. King), and Mavenoid. As a team of two they’ve now built their first product, rolled out firm-wide to 120 lawyers at Cederqvist, and are conducting pilots with top transactional firms in the US, UK, and Sweden.

We’re delighted to join Emergence Capital, Paul Graham, Y Combinator, and our very own Anton Osika in backing Vesence in their $9M pre-seed to build the agentic future of law.