Openlaw raises $3.3M to end Europe’s company formation nightmare

In the United States, incorporating a company can take as little as 24 hours. In Germany, the same process takes six to eight weeks. Founders must navigate notary appointments, commercial register filings, transparency register submissions, tax number applications, and a maze of agencies — most of it still paper-based. Munich-based Openlaw was built to end that, and has now closed a $3.3 million seed round to make it happen.

Five years in the making

The story behind beglaubigt.de actually starts in 2019, when founders Alexander Sporenberg and Felix Gerlach built their first prototype in Germany — only to discover that German law didn’t yet permit it. Rather than give up, they watched the regulatory landscape and pivoted to Austria when the legal framework loosened in 2020, officially launching there in 2022. Germany — their real target — followed in 2023, with rapid product development.

By 2024, they had surpassed 10,000 customers, earned acceptance into Y Combinator, and had a clear template for scaling. Today, the platform serves over 25,000 customers with a 4.8/5 rating on Trustpilot.

That five-year journey from blocked prototype to market leader is a founder story worth paying attention to.

The platform: beglaubigt.de

beglaubigt.de digitises the entire company formation process: from preparing incorporation documents and coordinating notary appointments to commercial register entries, transparency register filings, business address registration, tax number applications, and real-time bookkeeping. What used to take eight weeks now takes as little as three days.

The platform works with around 300 notary offices across Germany, handling the administrative layer on behalf of founders — scheduling, document preparation, and register filings — while legal counsel and actual notarisation remain with the notaries. It supports GmbH, UG, and GbR formations as well as tax-optimised holding structures.

Business address registration starts at €99, and the full formation flow is available through three dedicated APIs: one for certifications, one for incorporations, and one for tax number registrations, allowing partners to embed the entire legal back-office directly into their own products.

beglaubigt.de is already live inside Qonto, Holvi, and Sevdesk. Germany’s first fully automated incorporation API means founders can start a company formation without ever leaving their banking app.

As Malte Dous, Managing Director Central Europe at Qonto, said: “With beglaubigt.de integrated into our product, customers can go from opening an account to incorporating their company seamlessly. It saves founders precious time and makes starting a business significantly easier.”

In 2025, the company added certified translations as a standalone product — valid in 120+ countries under the Hague Apostille Convention — and positioned itself as a European market leader in the category. The platform runs on ISO-27001 certified infrastructure with 99.9% uptime, end-to-end encryption (TLS 1.3 in transit, AES-256 at rest), and full GDPR compliance.

The problem is bigger than just incorporation

Europe isn’t just slow on company formation — it’s fragmented across 27 national legal systems and more than 60 different corporate forms. Nearly 60% of German founders are dissatisfied with Germany as a business location, according to the DIHK Report 2025, and three-quarters are calling for faster, simpler regulation.

The EU’s proposed 28th regime (EU Inc.) aims to create a pan-European incorporation standard, but even if that passes, the ongoing administration layer — tax registrations, register entries, document certifications — will remain complex and jurisdiction-specific for years.

Openlaw’s ambition is to become the digital infrastructure layer underneath all of it: not replacing institutions, but sitting between founders and the bureaucracy, across every European market.

The team

CEO Alexander Sporenberg was part of the founding team at Razor Group, the e-commerce aggregator that reached unicorn status at a $1.7 billion valuation in just 15 months — one of Germany’s fastest-ever unicorn journeys. Across hundreds of M&A deals, he experienced firsthand how notary appointments and register processes became the real bottleneck.

“At Razor, we built a unicorn in 15 months, but waiting for notary appointments nearly derailed us. In the US, it would have taken days. That’s exactly what we’re solving with Openlaw, so European founders don’t fail because of bureaucracy.”

CPO Felix Gerlach built his career in the Rocket Internet ecosystem before founding Passbase, a global identity verification platform backed by Lakestar, Cowboy Ventures, and Costanoa Ventures, which was acquired by Parallel Markets in 2023. Both went through Y Combinator’s F24 batch in San Francisco — among the very few German startups ever accepted.

Together, they now lead a team of 15 legal and technology experts, with operations across 8 global locations.

The round

The $3.3 million seed round brings together a strong set of backers for a legaltech at this stage. YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim invested via Y Ventures. Moonfire Ventures — founded by Atomico co-founder Mattias Ljungman — joined alongside Zeno Ventures, Combination VC, Orange Collective, and a group of prominent angels, including numerous YC alumni and founders with prior exits.

The capital will be used to expand beglaubigt.de’s product offering in Germany — adding additional registration processes and full bookkeeping to the platform — before rolling the model out to additional European markets.