This is the story of an investment and of two repeat founders, but it’s more than just that: it’s the story of a problem that every entrepreneur in Italy has faced. It’s the story of a technology that suddenly makes this problem solvable. And it’s the story of the perfect team to make it happen. This is the story of why we invested in Iusful.
The call nobody likes to make
If you ask any entrepreneur when they last spoke to their lawyer, you will likely hear that it happened after something had gone wrong. An invoice unpaid for months. A hire that turned into a dispute. A contract signed in a hurry and regretted later. The lawyer usually comes into play when the problem is already on the table, rarely before.
This is strange, because legal needs in a company are not exceptional events. Getting an invoice paid, hiring someone, managing a dismissal, signing a contract, handling a compliance question: there are more than fifty areas in which a business can need legal support, and most of them are part of ordinary weekly operations. Yet for most Italian companies the relationship with a lawyer stays tied to the emergency, instead of becoming a continuous, preventive part of running the business.
The numbers are crystal clear. 58.4% of Italian companies do not have a lawyer they work with on a continuous basis, and 23.3% have never turned to one at all (Organismo Congressuale Forense, 2025). When support does come, it is often fragmented and expensive, with costs that are hard to predict, long response times, and a technical language that many entrepreneurs were never trained to read. This friction comes with a measurable price: inefficient contract management, between imprecision, unidentified risks and missing planning, erodes 9.2% of annual revenue on average, against 3% for more structured companies (World Commerce & Contracting, 2025).
Plus, lawyers are expensive. It’s hard to justify asking a legal opinion every time you are unsure about something, because the bill ramps up quickly. The result of this is that entrepreneurs improvise. More and more of them paste contracts into generalist chatbots and act on answers that no professional has validated. This is completely reasonable for the reasons outlined above, but it’s also a way to expose a company to serious legal consequences without knowing it.
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Why now
There’s one specific element that make this the perfect time for Iusful to be built.
Until a few years ago, an entrepreneur who wanted to understand the logic of an investment contract or draft an NDA had one door to knock on. Today the preparatory work, the document intake, the first draft, the comparison between clauses, can be done by software in minutes and at a fraction of the cost. But it’s important to clarify that artificial intelligence does not remove the lawyer from the equation, it only removes the most time-consuming layer of the work around the lawyer, and in doing so it shifts the lawyer’s role upward: validation, judgment, strategy and legal responsibility. These elements stay with the professional, who can finally spend time on them instead of on paperwork. Continuous legal support, once reserved for companies large enough to afford an in-house team, becomes accessible to everyone else.
The proof that legal is a great use case for AI is everywhere. Harvey, in the US, just announced that they raised $550M at a $15.5B, working with law firms and corporate legal teams at scale. Legora, born in Stockholm, passed $100M in annual recurring revenue and a $5.6B valuation this spring, and is reportedly in talks for a new round at $10B or more. In the UK, Lawhive is proving that the model Iusful is built on can scale: an AI platform paired with a network of licensed lawyers, transparent fixed prices, more than $35M in annual revenue grown sevenfold in a year, and a $60M Series B raised in February to expand across the US. Here in Italy, Lexroom is showing the same pull. The sector is moving fast. What Italy was missing is a company built specifically around the needs of Italian businesses, from the small family firm to the large enterprise.
The perfect team for this
In 2018, Roberto Marazzini and Michele Papagni co-founded Boolean Careers, a tech training school which they sold in 2021 to a private equity fund. Along the way they dealt with the legal life of a growing company firsthand: hires and dismissals, commercial contracts, the complexity that accumulates when a small business becomes a larger one, up to the legal work of an exit. After Boolean they went separate ways and then found each other again working as consultants, where the same pattern kept appearing across the companies they advised: unpredictable costs, slow answers, opaque communication. The problem was everywhere, and it was structural.
Iusful was born from that experience, together with third co-founder Federica Pulcino whom they had worked alongside at Boolean, and with Alberto Moneta, a lawyer who serves as Chief Legal Officer and coordinates the network of licensed professionals active on the platform.
There is a personal symmetry we like in this story. Roberto, Michele and Federica built their first company and hit the wall that Iusful now exists to remove. Founders who have felt a problem on their own skin tend to build with a different kind of care, and we saw that care in every conversation we had with them.
Roberto is also one of the first believers in IFF and an active member of our Community since the start of the project. He believed in IFF because he saw how much Italy would benefit from having some of the best Italian entrepreneurs investing in the next generation of companies with an Italian DNA. After seeing the value of the IFF platform, he has now joined the other side of the table too by becoming a portfolio founder. It’s a loop that closes, and a proof that we are building something that matters.
What Iusful does
Iusful gives Italian companies a continuous legal partner: a vetted network of lawyers, guided by a platform that uses AI for the preparatory work and collects all of a company’s legal activity in one place, with a price defined before the work starts and clear timelines.
There’s an explicit division of labor built into the platform, which prepares, but does not decide. Technology handles the time-consuming intake and preparation, while every opinion, document or strategy carries the signature of a lawyer enrolled in the bar, who stays responsible for it. Since the soft launch on June 23, Iusful has already handled more than 100 cases across the most common needs of Italian businesses: commercial contracts, privacy and GDPR, labor law, debt collection, tax, legal due diligence, IP, litigation and more.
A shared instinct
At IFF we exist to bring more capital to Italian founders, because we believe talent here is far more abundant than access to it. Iusful is animated by the same instinct from a different angle: making something essential and historically expensive, quality legal support, accessible and transparent for every company.
This summer we partnered with BonelliErede to publish a free set of standard investment documents, so that founders and investors could stop reinventing the same paperwork at every round. The response to that project told us how wide the demand for simpler, more transparent legal work really is. Iusful is the company that takes this idea and builds a business around it.
This round is the first investment we are making side by side with United Ventures, one of the most experienced and successful firms in Italian venture, and hopefully the first of many! We are also glad to see some of Italy’s best known early stage firms join the round: Alecla7, Vento, Vesper Holding and Ithaca Investments.
To Roberto, Michele, Federica, Alberto and the whole Iusful team: congratulations on closing this round. The road ahead is long, and we will be walking it with you.
-Lorenzo
