Anyone who’s spent time in due diligence, particularly in M&A, knows the drill. Hours combing through data rooms, sorting out document gaps, manually checking clauses, compiling draft reports. It’s a methodical process, and one that hasn’t changed much in decades. But Jurimesh, a Belgium-based legal tech startup, is asking a simple question: what if due diligence didn’t have to be such a slog?
Founded in 2023 and operating from Ghent’s historic Wintercircus, now a modern tech hub, Jurimesh offers a platform designed to streamline legal due diligence through artificial intelligence. The company combines machine learning, document automation, and legal expertise into a tool built specifically for lawyers, not around them.
The platform integrates with data rooms, reads files in real time, flags risks across contracts, and turns those findings into reports, all while keeping lawyers in control. It’s been picked up by firms like Andersen and Grant Thornton, as well as boutique M&A outfits looking to increase output without sacrificing accuracy.
Built for the Long Haul (and the Tight Deadline)
Where traditional review processes often rely on junior lawyers working long hours, Jurimesh promises a faster route to the same result. The platform scans contracts as they’re uploaded, whether from local folders, Google Drive, SharePoint or a VDR, and immediately goes to work. Its AI engine parses documents using optical character recognition and legal pattern recognition, sorting them into categories and surfacing red flags in just a few clicks.
Gap analysis is another key feature. Users can compare uploaded documents against predefined checklists, allowing them to quickly identify missing items or incomplete records, a task that usually takes hours of manual reconciliation. From there, lawyers can flag individual clauses, add comments, and export their findings into a polished due diligence report.
“It improves both efficiency and the quality of our legal advice,” said Davy Gorselé, managing partner at Quorum, one of the firm’s early adopters. That combination, speed and substance, is where Jurimesh aims to stake its claim.
Backed to Build What’s Next
In February 2025, Jurimesh announced a €1.6 million pre-seed round, led by Syndicate One and joined by a lineup of business angels from Belgium’s legal and tech scene. The funding is earmarked for expanding the AI team, building out legal reasoning capabilities, and widening the company’s presence across Europe.
According to CEO Jorrit Willaert, the ambition is to remove repetitive work entirely. “The legal industry has tolerated inefficiency for too long,” he said. “We’re here to change that.”
Investors seem to agree. “While legal AI has so far largely focused on broad horizontal applications, Jorrit and Jasper impressed us with their sharp focus on perfecting the specific task of legal due diligence,” said Hans Kayaert of Syndicate One. “It’s the kind of vertical depth that legal tech has been missing.”
A Tighter Loop Between Lawyers and Machines
There’s no shortage of AI tools claiming to simplify legal work, but many lack domain specificity. Jurimesh is taking a different approach: don’t build something for everyone, build something that actually works for a well-defined need. That’s why its user interface is tailored to how M&A lawyers think, and why its AI is trained to look for things lawyers actually care about, like indemnity clauses, change-of-control provisions, and earn-out mechanisms.
The long-term bet is that legal due diligence, one of the most tedious, but essential, parts of M&A, can eventually be reduced to something far more strategic. Less time buried in documents. More time focused on judgement calls. And when time is money, that trade-off is hard to ignore.
Jurimesh isn’t claiming to replace lawyers. But it is building a system where their time is used better.
