Duely Raises €1.1M to Reinvent M&A Legal Services with AI

The critical distinction is what happens after the AI processes the data. Rather than simply handing raw AI output to a client, Duely's in-house team and network of external legal partners verify the results. The company then delivers the polished work product—due diligence reports, risk analyses, deal preparation materials—while taking full professional responsibility for the final deliverables .

This puts Duely in a unique category. It is neither a pure software-as-a-service tool for law firms nor a traditional law firm with an AI assistant. It is an AI-native service provider that bundles the technology, verification, and liability into a single per-page price .

From API-first startup to AI-native service provider

The company's evolution reveals just how much the AI age is reshaping professional services. Duely was founded as an API-first technology company. Its core asset was—and remains—the Duely API, a proprietary artificial intelligence engine purpose-built to understand and structure the chaotic reality of M&A data rooms . The original plan was straightforward: license that API to virtual data room platforms and law firms so they could offer AI features natively to their users .

But the strategic calculation changed. Instead of remaining a middleware provider whose value was captured and repackaged by others, Duely decided to become the client-facing service itself. It still uses its own API internally and still partners with VDR providers on the technology side. But the business model pivoted decisively from licensing technology to selling guaranteed legal outcomes .

That shift changes the competitive landscape entirely. Duely now positions itself as a direct alternative to instructing a traditional law firm on an M&A due diligence mandate—but with the same quality deliverables, at a fraction of the time, and with transparent per-page pricing that replaces billable hours .

Who it serves and how

The service is built for the three main constituencies in any M&A transaction: sell-side advisors preparing a company for sale, buy-side teams evaluating a target, and corporate legal departments managing in-house deal workflows .

The technical workflow integrates directly with industry-standard virtual data rooms. Once given secure access, the Duely AI engine ingests the entire document corpus, automatically organizing unstructured content, extracting key facts and financial metrics, and generating concise summaries for decision-makers . A built-in AI assistant can also answer natural-language queries about specific documents, folders, or figures—with source traceability to the underlying files .

Crucially, Duely's public-facing commitment is that it takes full responsibility for the final work product "just like a law firm does" . That is the axis on which the business model gamble turns. If the AI-verified-by-human model proves reliable and defensible across multiple European jurisdictions and complex multi-jurisdictional deals, Duely could reset client expectations for what M&A legal services should cost and how quickly they should be delivered.

Growth plans across Europe

The fresh capital is explicitly intended to take the model beyond Belgium. Duely's announcement frames the €1.1 million as growth funding for scaling its AI-native legal services across Europe .

The company, currently based in Ghent, will need to navigate the fragmentation of European legal markets, differing regulatory requirements from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and the conservative instincts of corporate buyers accustomed to instructing established law firms. But the timing may be on its side: as other Belgian AI legal startups like Alice and Jurimesh also attract investment and attention, the broader legaltech ecosystem in Belgium is developing the talent and credibility needed to support cross-border ambitions .

If Duely's per-page, AI-native service model holds up outside its home market, it will have demonstrated that an AI company can successfully climb the value chain from selling developer tools to owning the client relationship—and in the process, begin to unbundle the billable hour for good.