Vesence raises $9m from Emergence, Anton Osika and Paul Graham | Henrik and Ludvig, the Cofounders

0:00Hello and welcome back. I'm Sade from Scaling Europe. We have got a very, very, very exciting announcement and very exciting guest. Look, Ludvig Henrik, you guys are from Vessence. What have you got to talk about in the house? It's super exciting. Yeah, so much thanks for having us on. Yeah, so we're announcing our seed round. We just raised$9 million with Emergence Leading. And yeah, we're here to basically make agents work well for lawyers. Because we feel like AI and legal is huge potential. But I don't think we really have seen the kind of like transformational change that you would have anticipated from the potential.

0:45So we're super, super excited to talk more about this. Amazing. Congratulations. It's a phenomenal achievement and result. Can you touch a little bit more on what exactly you're building, maybe some use cases for some lawyers and how this technology will bring about the changes in the legal sector that you want it to? Sure. So I'm a coder. And last year, I started using something called Cursor. and cursor I think was kind of the pivotal moment for when us coders realized like how much more help we can get from agents and the kind of core insight we saw was a that cursor is integrated into the tools we already use so in our case VS Code and two that it's very it's such a good UI to review the changes from the AI.

1:39If you think about ChatGPT, for example, it's almost like the UI is purporting that, you know, the answer on the AI is correct. Like, it just gives you an answer, and you're supposed to take it from there. But Pursor gives you suggestions. It shows you directly where you're already working, like, hey, maybe you should change this because of this and that. and I think like this was the crucial moment that that was like really key to unlocking insane adoptions among developers so me and Lovie we asked ourselves hey what would like this kind of paradigm look like for other professions and we all have a lawyer friends and we we literally just showed them cursor and they were so amazed because the way cursor shows changes looks very much like track changes does in Word.

2:30So it was just so natural for them. So we just started asking, okay, but what do you want it to do? Like imagine we could do this in Microsoft Word and they told us like, hey, what we're doing is we're taking all documents, precedents, and Frankenstein them together. And we want to find and like fix all inconsistencies inside of document and across multiple documents. What if you could just surface that direct inside of Word as ai suggestions and that's exactly what we built and we showed a big law firm here in sweden this and they were so excited when they saw the prototype so they just signed immediately that's amazing what better validation could you could you ask for um what was that a like a pilot or is that like was that initial client something that enabled you to unlock this nine million dollar round so we actually went full uh y combinator before actually going into y combinator with this and primarily like doing things that don't scale.

3:27So we told them like we can educate you on AI. We can show what's working, what's not working and primarily sit with the users day in and day out to actually get the feedback on the products. So what we did was we actually spent three months at their office, like eating breakfast there, going to the gym with the users, eating like dinner there, everything like everything we could to just get as much time as possible with them. to get feedback and really build something that they love. And I think that was the key to unlock a lot of adoption for an industry that is pretty hard to develop or adopt new technology.

4:07Amazing, yeah. I mean, what's it been like, I guess, since that initial client? Have you been able to speak to more law firms and you're seeing more traction? I guess, you know, I don't imagine law firms being the fastest moving industry or organizations or have you found that not to be true? Are they tech savvy? are they forward thinking what's it been like trying to break into those law firms yeah i think just spending the quality time that we did in the beginning uh made us realize the actual problems that many users are facing and when you spend that time in the beginning you start to you can actually build a product that a lot of people use so just focusing on love from very few users in the beginning is the best like it's the key to unlock rapid scale so when we demo our product now like the the amount of love we see from the first introduction is insane and also like when we actually start pilots we've started multiple pilots now it's from the onboarding call that we see love for the product we're just mind-blowing how intuitive it is to use exactly and also you know there are some ai softwares out there for uh for law firms and we haven't really seen like the transformation yet and I think the key thing is adoption and like usability and also the fact that we think about the use cases first and develop the features after like design them after the use cases as opposed to like just giving a you know chat bot to law firms and asking them to come up with like what they should use it for lawyers are extremely busy they don't have time to like you know study and understand what the ai can do um so i feel like a lot of law firms is just struggling with this adoption and when we come with like you know one click bottom solution it becomes pretty clear to them what the value is amazing so you're really rooting it in the user experience and the use cases you you touched on the other big ai kind of companies that we've got out there with people like seeing people like lagora and harvey raise huge valuations how are you differentiating yourself from the existing ai players in this space i think there's a lot to build in legal tech like there's a lot i think we have thought of five other startup ideas within this space just with our here so there's a lot to build uh in outlook inward and then for the specific workflows as well and i think our key is that we focus on quality first.

6:35We want to build AI agents that review work and start from there. It's not about building our own chatbot that you can chat with or anything like that. We want to build the agents that are the best in the world to review your work, both in Outlook and in Word. And that is how we've really cracked adoption, I would say, and get a lot of usage from the most senior partners to the most junior associates as well. And that's what separates us from the other, I would say. very much that's really interesting do you see a difference in the adoption between more senior versus more junior people in the law firm i think the the difference is we we have an outlook plugin as well that reviews sort of all your attachments and the thread etc and generates track changes in outlook that is used daily with like for many hours by the partners at the law firms while the word is much more used word app is much more used by the uh the associates but we've really cracked adoption i would say from the the most junior to the most senior as i mentioned yeah that's amazing um and can you talk a little bit about the rows so just recap how much who from i think can we talk a bit about how that process went yeah um so we started this company back in february and we got into yc like a month or two after and when we landed in san Francisco, apparently like Paul Graham had read our application and he actually invited us to his house and he got super, super excited about this.

8:08So he was the first person to invest. And after that, the round has kind of been on autopilot sort of. But yeah, we started with a lot of angels. So Paul Graham was our first angel investor. And then after that, we worked, both of us worked with Anton Ossica at Lovable. He was our boss at Depict. So he's a very close friend of ours. So he was another angel investor that joined. And then we had so much interest from angels. So after a while, it was just like, hey, you should really go out. Like, you'll get the money. Like, who do you actually want to work with this for 10 years? And that's when we started compiling our dream team.

8:48So that's when we met Emergence and we really love their approach and their track record is absolutely amazing. So they led the round. And then we also got back by Curandum, who's also from Stockholm. We heard so many great things from partly Anton Ossica or Inge Lovestor from Lovable and other friends here from Stockholm. So we really wanted to have them on the cap table as well. Yeah, it's super. It's like such an interesting way of braising the round. Because once you've got Paul Graham and you've got Anton on your cap table as some of those earliest agent investors, it gives you that momentum and that excitement that it probably makes it so much easier than, you know, trying to get them the other way around.

9:29And what's your focus going to be now? You know, you've got a lot of cash in the bank. You've talked about being in, you know, going through YC, California. Are you going to be based in Stockholm, focus building there, New York, San Francisco? Where are you going to be building the teams? Where are you going to be selling to? Yeah, our focus right now is really taking care of the pilots that we're working with. And we see a lot of interest from Europe and in the US. Given that we're from here, we're starting our focus in Stockholm, Sweden, and around Europe. But the interest from the US is, of course, very interesting for us as well.

10:02So it's going to be for right now, it's Stockholm and Europe. And then, yeah, in the near term, it's going to be a lot of US as well. Yeah, of course. Are you sensing any pull towards the US at all already? Are you seeing firms be interested or not yet? Yeah, a lot, actually. So we're very interested by that, actually. So we're working with some firms already. But see, we just got an inbound, actually, from one of the big ones in the world just before this call. So we were a bit, like, shocked going into this. And there's some giants over there. And of course, through Y Combinator and Emergence as well, we had a lot of contacts in there.

10:47Amazing. I mean, that's amazing. Yeah, it's phenomenal. You know, getting inbounded by some of your, I imagine, your dream ICPs. You touched on Depict. I wanted to talk a bit about that because you both spent several years there. How did your experiences there shape the way that you are build, shipping, selling on your new venture here? I think what's crazy about Depict is like I didn't realize how insane the talent density was there. before I went to San Francisco, started talking to people outside of the pig because the pig was kind of my first real job. And I think the key things we learned there was what not to do.

11:27Scaling a team too quickly and distributing responsibilities and the diluting focus is such a... Like, it's very hard to understand how big of a deal it can be and how challenging it is to, like, align people and such like that, especially people with extremely high talent, because everyone wants to have a huge impact. So really being, you know, very, very adamant about making sure that every person coming into the team has a specific place and responsibility to work within, I think is huge. but then what would you also yeah I would just add the importance of working with brilliant people I think so true yeah so Anton was our one of our bosses and he was chatting about Lovable even back then and he was willing to take that bet and yeah it's insane how fast it's gone since then I think Oliver the CEO as well was one of the most talented people I've ever met he was 17 when he started this company Depict and And yeah, we all trusted him a lot because he was just ruthless in his execution.

12:38He was so good, a really good manager as well. And they were able to recruit one of the best teams, I would say, in Europe, if not the world. Given the amount of amazing companies that the employees from there have started after that. So I think the bar of talent you get after working at the PICT is just so insane. But you've also seen what really good looks like from the team. And I think my favorite thing is do things that don't scale. Like I remember the anger people had when Oliver brought it up. But, you know, being there and when you start to take responsibility for the code and the customers you're selling to, that's when you really feel the cost of, you know, scaling things prematurely and optimizing things prematurely.

13:25I've seen like tens of examples of things where like doing the things that doesn't scale to get like you know that zero to one just makes so much of a difference yeah interesting and and it's not I depict as you're becoming an amazing founder factory but Stockholm itself is just like having such a big moment I mean even where I was like strawberry I think was last week or two weeks ago epimines it's just like every week there's another amazing round of all like almost always young ambitious swedish founders what's it like building in this swedish stockholm ecosystem at the moment i think it's kind of weird because all of these people you're bringing up are friends of ours like it's a very small clique of people uh so we all know each other and we're all helping each other as well so i think there's like a huge noble effect of like okay this team got into yc oh now we're talking about them they're sharing their like experiences and then another team gets into yc or another team becomes a unicorn and they're sharing everything so i think like the culture of like helping each other out is super super strong yeah and i really want to give a shout out to the universities like stockham school of economics and kdh as well like the founders from those schools have been amazing for many years say 30 years so like we've been inspired by skype then with it was the spotify and clorna revolution i i remember our first day at ssc voy was introduced so it's like my first scooter trip and like the the company that has become now is like insane so you've seen like okay people like you have done it in the past so you also know like it's a lot about the mentality as well that's seeing hey you can actually build something for yeah for the world even though you're from stockholm so yeah giving you that global mind yeah exactly i guess um well look congratulations on the round thank you so much for joining me um phenomenal it's super exciting the talent uh the businesses that are being built outside of stockholm or inside of stockholm um so look i'll be wishing you the best of luck but yeah thank you for joining me thank you so much

15:39Thank you.