Pamir Ehsas spent years advising OpenAI and major tech companies on legal matters, watching the legal industry ignore artificial intelligence entirely while the technology reshaped everything else. He decided to build the law firm he wished existed. Moritz, co-founded with MIT-Fulbright scholar Stefan Mandaric, just raised $9 million in an oversubscribed round that closed in just four days, backed by Y Combinator and 20VC.

The speed of the funding round itself tells a story about where venture capital sees opportunity. Ehsas and Mandaric initially aimed to raise $3 million and scheduled more than 200 venture capital meetings before Y Combinator's Demo Day. But after hitting their fundraising goal on the first day, they cancelled most of the remaining meetings and focused instead on bringing in operators and founders from successful companies rather than traditional investors.

What Problem Is Moritz Actually Solving?

The legal market is broken in a way that few people outside of business notice. Companies spend hundreds of billions each year on outside counsel, yet the client experience has barely changed in decades. Even though artificial intelligence tools from companies like Legora, Harvey, LexisNexis, and Thomson Reuters are widely used, legal costs continue to rise.

Moritz operates as a traditional law firm, but with a fundamentally different model. Clients submit their legal matters and receive a flat-fee quote immediately. The firm's artificial intelligence handles most of the drafting and research work, then a network of over 50 lawyers reviews and approves the final product. Moritz provides full attorney liability, and on average, work is completed in four hours.

The results speak for themselves. In one recent example, Moritz drafted a $290 million master services agreement for a US financial services company in just 24 hours. The other side's traditional law firm took four weeks to review the same document. When the contract was signed, it required only two minor changes.

How Does Moritz's AI-Powered Approach Work?

• Automated Drafting: Artificial intelligence handles the initial drafting and legal research, reducing the time lawyers spend on routine tasks and allowing them to focus on review and quality assurance.
• Lawyer Network Review: A distributed network of over 50 licensed attorneys reviews and approves all AI-generated work, ensuring full legal accountability and professional standards are maintained.
• Flat-Fee Pricing: Clients receive immediate flat-fee quotes instead of hourly billing, making legal costs predictable and eliminating the uncertainty that comes with traditional law firm engagement.
• Speed at Scale: The combination of AI automation and lawyer review enables the firm to complete work in hours rather than weeks, without sacrificing quality or legal protection.

In its first three months of operation, Moritz helped over 100 companies across the US, Europe, and Australia close deals worth more than $2 billion. Its client base ranges from early-stage startups to public companies with large in-house legal teams.

"I was advising companies building the most important technology of our generation. And I still couldn't believe how slow and expensive the legal experience was. If it's broken there, it's broken everywhere," said Pamir Ehsas.

Pamir Ehsas, Co-founder of Moritz

Why Is Y Combinator Betting on This Now?

The funding round attracted more than just institutional investors. Y Combinator and 20VC led the round, but the syndicate also included founders and early investors from Reddit, Instacart, Dropbox, Gusto, Runway, Hugging Face, Supercell, WorkOS, Mixpanel, Cruise, Superhuman, and more than a dozen other unicorn-backed companies.

This investor composition reveals something important about how venture capital is thinking about artificial intelligence in 2026 and beyond. The focus is shifting away from building new AI models and toward applying AI to solve real problems in industries that have resisted technological change for decades. Legal services, like accounting, consulting, and compliance, represent massive markets where artificial intelligence can deliver immediate, measurable value.

The new funding will help Moritz expand its network of lawyers, enhance its AI-driven legal workflows, and expand into additional areas of law beyond commercial contracts. This suggests the founders see the current model as a proof of concept for a much larger opportunity.

For Y Combinator, backing Moritz fits a broader pattern. The accelerator has increasingly focused on startups that use artificial intelligence to automate or improve legacy industries, rather than companies building artificial intelligence itself. Moritz represents exactly that thesis: a team with deep domain expertise, Ehsas's years advising OpenAI and other tech companies, applying modern technology to an industry that has been slow to change.

The speed at which Moritz closed its funding round, and the caliber of operators who chose to invest, suggests that venture capital is ready to bet big on artificial intelligence companies that solve real business problems rather than chase the next frontier in model development.