Eight weeks. That's how long it typically takes to incorporate a GmbH in Germany, enough time for a hot startup idea to cool or for a competitor to beat you to market. Felix Gerlach and Alex Sporenberg thought that timeline was absurd. So they built Beglaubigt.de to collapse it into three days.
On April 16, 2026, Openlaw UG, the Munich-based legal tech company operating Beglaubigt.de, announced it had raised $3.3 million in seed funding, led by Moonfire Ventures with participation from Zeno Ventures, Y Ventures (backed by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim), and Y Combinator. The round comes just months after the startup emerged from YC's Fall 2024 batch—perhaps with more investor appetite than even the founders anticipated.
For anyone who's suffered through the labyrinth of German corporate registration, that kind of timeline compression isn't a marginal improvement. It's the difference between keeping momentum and watching it drain away while you wait for stamps and signatures.
The Machinery Behind the Pitch
What Beglaubigt.de calls "the legal back-office for European founders" is really an API play. The company has embedded itself into platforms that founders already rely on—Qonto for banking, Holvi for freelancer finances, sevDesk for accounting. Instead of company formation being a separate headache, it becomes a feature within tools people are using anyway.
The regulatory foundation matters here, maybe more than the technology itself. According to Qonto's help documentation (updated as recently as July 2025), Beglaubigt.de's digital notarization rests on Germany's DiRUG legislation, which took effect August 1, 2022. The company's certifications also align with the Hague Apostille Convention, giving them recognition across 113 countries. Legal tech doesn't win by outrunning regulators. It wins by finding what newly permissible corridors the law has opened.
The service stack includes digital incorporations and notarizations, certified translations, a business address paired with what the company describes as an "AI mailroom," and registry filings. According to coverage from startup.eu, the seed money will fund an expansion into ongoing bookkeeping and broader registry processes in Germany before the team attempts to export the model across Europe.
The company says it processes thousands of cases annually and posted 4.3× year-over-year growth heading into 2025—figures pulled from a job listing on YC's Work at a Startup platform, which means they're self-reported but at least recent.
Founders Who've Been Here Before
Gerlach isn't building his first company. He co-founded Passbase, a KYC and anti-money-laundering startup that landed him on Forbes' 30 Under 30 Europe list in 2020. Parallel Markets acquired Passbase's assets in March 2023, and Gerlach moved on to Platus, which later rebranded to Beglaubigt.de.
His co-founder, Alex Sporenberg, comes from Razor Group, an e-commerce aggregator that scaled to a valuation above €1.7 billion. YC's company page credits Sporenberg with overseeing more than 100 M&A deals there—the kind of high-volume transactional work that probably made German incorporation bureaucracy feel especially maddening by comparison.
The two joined YC's Fall 2024 cohort under the name Platus before pivoting or rebranding to Beglaubigt.de. The original Launch YC post for Platus is still live, a small artifact of the company's evolution. YC ran a Demo Day in December 2024, featuring an in-person element after a period of virtual events, and invested $500,000 on standard terms: a $125,000 post-money SAFE for 7% equity plus a $375,000 uncapped MFN SAFE.
The team now employs roughly 20 people in Munich, according to recent job postings, though YC's directory still lists 15. Headcount numbers on accelerator sites often lag reality.
The Bet on Infrastructure That Removes Friction
Beyond the headline investors, Beglaubigt.de's LinkedIn announcement added Flex Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Mento VC, Combination VC, and Orange Collective to the cap table, along with YC alumni and individual angels. It's a roster that suggests confidence in infrastructure plays—the unsexy backend tools that make everything else run smoother.
Dealroom's database pegs the round at a $17.5 million valuation, though that figure should be treated as an estimate rather than something the company has confirmed.
YC has backed legal tech before. Ironclad, from the Summer 2015 batch, now employs 700 people according to its YC listing. Clerky, which came out of Summer 2011, remains the default incorporation tool for U.S. startups. Beglaubigt.de is aiming for a similar infrastructure role in Europe, where regulatory fragmentation has historically made it harder to build continent-wide legal products than it is in the more unified U.S. market.
The Question Europe Still Needs to Answer
The promise is clean: incorporate in three days instead of two months, spend less time on paperwork, more time shipping product. Simple enough.
Whether that promise scales beyond Germany is the real test. The regulatory environment in France looks different from Spain, which looks different from Poland. Beglaubigt.de's founders are betting they can navigate that fragmentation, that what worked in Munich can work in Madrid and Warsaw. If they're right, this seed round will look like table stakes for what becomes a genuinely pan-European platform. If not—well, Germany is a large enough market on its own. But probably not large enough to justify the ambitions that a $3.3 million raise suggests.
