How Two Repeat Founders Closed $3.3M with YouTube's Jawed Karim and YC - From a $14M Exit to Germany's Digital Notary
They sold an Alphabet-backed startup, built on the same trust layer, got into YC, and assembled 9 investors for a German notary app. This is the playbook behind the sequel company.
There’s a version of this story that fits neatly into a press release. Two YC founders raise a seed round for a German LegalTech company. Nice. Next.
Then there’s the version that includes the 150+ M&A deals at a $1.7 billion unicorn that revealed the bottleneck. The identity verification startup they built together, backed by Alphabet, that got acquired - and how that exact technology became the foundation for a completely different company. The German law that nobody shipped on. The API-first bet that turned fintech platforms into distribution channels. And the cap table deliberately constructed like a map of their expansion roadmap.
That version is what this episode is about.
The Pain That Started Everything: Hundreds of M&A Deals and One Bottleneck
Before beglaubigt.de existed, Alexander Sporenberg was on the founding team at Razor Group, the eCommerce aggregator that reached a $1.7 billion unicorn valuation in just 15 months. His role: Head of Acquisitions DACH & EU, then Head of B2B.
Razor Group was an acquisition machine. Buying Amazon FBA businesses across Europe at scale. More than 150 acquired companies. Every single acquisition required notarization - articles of association, share transfers, register entries. And every one of them hit the same wall: the German notary system.
Book an appointment weeks out. Sit in an office. Wet ink signatures. Wait for the commercial register entry. Repeat. On the Startup Insider podcast this week, Sporenberg described it plainly: the interplay between lawyers, notaries, and tax advisors was “sluggish, completely undigital, very slow, and very costly.”
Most operators would file this under “annoying but unavoidable.” Sporenberg filed it under “future company.” As he put it: “If the government won’t solve it, we will.”
The entrepreneurial insight here isn’t that German bureaucracy is slow. Everyone knows that. The insight is that Sporenberg experienced the pain at volume - not one incorporation, but hundreds of legal transactions - which gave him a fundamentally different view of the problem. He didn’t see a one-time inconvenience. He saw a repeating process failure at industrial scale. That’s the difference between complaining about a problem and building a company to solve it.
The Co-Founder: A Previous Exit in the Same Trust Infrastructure
Here’s where this story separates from a typical “operator sees problem, builds solution” narrative.
Felix Gerlach wasn’t a random co-founder hire. After a stint at Rocket Internet in Singapore and co-founding a crypto startup (Coinance Inc.) in San Francisco, Gerlach built Passbase - an identity verification platform that handled facial recognition, liveness detection, and ID verification across 190+ countries in 14 languages.
Passbase raised $14.2 million across four rounds. Pre-seed ($600K), seed ($3.6M), and a $10M Series A led by Costanoa Ventures in December 2021. The investor roster included Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Cowboy Ventures, and Eniac Ventures. Both Gerlach and Sporenberg were co-founders. In 2020, the team made Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe in the Finance category.
In March 2023, Parallel Markets acquired Passbase.
Now look at the thread connecting Passbase to beglaubigt.de: identity verification is the technological backbone of digital notarization. When you notarize a document online, the first thing that happens is identity verification - confirming you are who you claim to be. Passbase was building the trust layer for digital identity. beglaubigt.de is building the trust layer for legal transactions.
Same founders. Same domain expertise. Adjacent infrastructure. This isn’t a pivot - it’s a sequel.
The Regulatory Window: Building on a Law Nobody Else Shipped On
On August 1, 2022, Germany’s DiRUG - the law implementing the EU Digitalization Directive - came into force. For the first time, certain notarizations in Germany could happen online.
Gerlach started building beglaubigt.de in 2022 - right when the law landed. Sporenberg joined as CEO in October 2023, fresh from watching the Passbase acquisition close. By the time they applied to Y Combinator in mid-2024, they already had a working product with paying customers.
But here’s the nuance most people miss: beglaubigt.de doesn’t replace notaries. It can’t. German law mandates that the legal advice, formal instruction, and the actual certification must remain with licensed notaries.
So what does beglaubigt.de actually do? It works with a network of approximately 300 notary offices and handles everything around the notarization: the administration, appointment coordination, document preparation, and register filings. It’s the process orchestration layer, not the legal authority.
Gerlach explained on Startup Insider: “We don’t replace the notary. We digitize the entire process that happens before and after the actual certification.” The critical insight is what he said next: “We’re the first in the German market to bring all stakeholders together with APIs, webhooks, and co. - solving the triangle between founder, register, notary, and bank.”
This is a critical positioning decision. They’re not disrupting the notary system. They’re making it faster. In regulated markets, “infrastructure layer” beats “disruptor” every single time. Uber fought regulators for a decade. Stripe made banks more efficient and became a $95B company. Sporenberg and Gerlach chose the Stripe approach: make the existing system work better instead of trying to replace it.
The API-First Bet: Invisible Infrastructure Over Consumer Brand
The biggest strategic decision in this company isn’t the notarization product. It’s the distribution architecture.
Openlaw runs a fully automated “Incorporation API.” Partners like Qonto, Holvi, and Sevdesk integrate the entire company formation process directly into their own platforms. A founder opening a business bank account on Qonto can kick off their GmbH incorporation without leaving the Qonto interface.
Gerlach explained why the banking integration isn’t just a nice-to-have - it’s existential: German law requires founders to show proof of capital deposit to the notary before registration can proceed. If you don’t have a bank account with the required share capital deposited, no company gets formed. Period. That’s why the Qonto and Holvi partnerships aren’t distribution deals - they’re infrastructure dependencies built directly into the product.
Think about what this means for unit economics. beglaubigt.de doesn’t need to acquire customers through Google Ads or LinkedIn outreach. Qonto’s German customer base - hundreds of thousands of SMEs - becomes a built-in distribution channel. Every partner integration is a new customer acquisition channel with near-zero CAC.
The numbers reflect this: 25,000+ customers processed through the platform, with over 1,000 cases through the Qonto integration alone. Enterprise clients include Allianz, Vodafone, Siemens, and Bosch. The team is now 20 people (up from 10 a year ago), with qualified legal professionals handling the operational layer.
YC as European Reframing Device
Sporenberg and Gerlach applied to Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 batch. Not to accelerate beglaubigt.de - that was already working. They applied to launch Platus, the global version.
The corporate structure tells the story: Openlaw UG (Munich) is the parent. beglaubigt.de is the German product. Platus is the international expansion vehicle. On the YC Launch page (232 upvotes), beglaubigt.de is described as “Platus’ first customer.”
For German investors, they’re a LegalTech company digitizing notary appointments. For YC and US investors, they’re building global legal infrastructure across 27 European legal systems and 60+ company forms, with Germany as proof-of-concept market #1.
What did they actually take away from the YC experience? Sporenberg was direct: “In Silicon Valley, founders can focus on founding - on customer contact, on selling their products. They’re less burdened by bureaucratic processes. In Germany, 10 to 15 percent of a founder’s time goes to bureaucracy.” That stat became their mission statement.
The second takeaway was what Sporenberg called “customer obsession and speed.” They started with company formation and, by working closely with customers, rapidly expanded to trade registration, transparency register filings, tax registration, and bookkeeping. “We develop almost monthly new products based on customer needs,” he said. That YC-speed product cadence, applied to German bureaucracy, is a combination most European LegalTech companies haven’t attempted.
The Syndicate: Reading the Cap Table Like a Strategy Document
The $3.3M seed round includes:
Jawed Karim / Y Ventures - YouTube co-founder. Invests in technology transforming traditional industries.
Moonfire Ventures - Founded by Mattias Ljungman, co-founder of Atomico (Niklas Zennstrom’s fund). London-based, early-stage European focus.
Flex Capital - Berlin. B2B SaaS and efficiency-driven businesses.
Zeno Ventures - Operator-angel fund.
Palm Drive Capital - YC-connected, Sand Hill Road adjacency.
Mento VC - Early-stage German ecosystem.
Combination VC - Cross-border European deals.
Orange Collective - Angel collective.
YC alumni angels - Network layer from the batch.
Three things stand out.
First: the Moonfire signal. Mattias Ljungman co-founded Atomico with Skype’s Niklas Zennstrom. Moonfire is his next fund, focused on European companies that can become category leaders. When an investor with that pedigree backs you at seed, it’s a signal to Series A funds that this deal has been vetted by someone who’s seen European scale-ups go from zero to billions.
Second: the geographic architecture. Palm Drive (US), Moonfire (UK), Flex Capital and Mento (Germany), Combination VC (cross-border). This maps perfectly to Openlaw’s expansion roadmap: Germany first (beglaubigt.de), then UK/Europe (Platus), then US. Each investor opens a geographic corridor.
Third: 9+ investors at $3.3M. Average check around $350K. This isn’t a round led by one large fund. It’s a deliberate network-building exercise. For a company that needs to navigate 27 different European legal systems, having investors in multiple jurisdictions isn’t a cap table complication - it’s a strategic asset.
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The Competitive Reality (And Why Positioning Matters)
This isn’t a blue ocean. The competitive landscape is densely populated. firma.de has been doing formation-as-a-service for years. Recht24/7 offers legal tech solutions. RIDE specializes in holding structures and asset management GmbHs. And every traditional notary office in Germany is technically a competitor.
The DIHK Report 2025 adds context: 60% of German founders are dissatisfied with Germany as a business location. 75% demand faster, simpler regulations. And the brain drain is real. On the day of the funding announcement, Gerlach posted on LinkedIn: “Real change won’t come from the government.” On Startup Insider, he went further: “It’s very hard to invest in a GmbH. Investors would rather invest in a US Inc.” When your own country’s legal structure makes it harder to receive investment than a Delaware C-Corp, you have a systemic problem - and a massive market opportunity for whoever fixes it.
Openlaw’s bet is that the API-first approach - being invisible infrastructure inside fintech platforms rather than a direct-to-founder brand - creates a defensibility layer that firma.de and traditional alternatives can’t easily replicate. Once your Incorporation API is embedded in Qonto’s onboarding flow, that’s not a partnership you switch out because a competitor is 10% cheaper.
The Playbook, Distilled: 7 Lessons
1. Experience pain at volume, not in theory.
Sporenberg didn’t read about German bureaucracy being slow. He processed 150+ M&A deals at Razor Group and hit the notary bottleneck at industrial scale. The best company ideas come from operating inside a broken process, not observing it from the outside.
2. Your previous company is R&D for the next one.
Passbase (identity verification) to beglaubigt.de (digital notarization). Same trust infrastructure, different application. Gerlach’s five years building identity verification across 190+ countries directly applies to verifying identities for legal transactions. Stop thinking in pivots. Think in sequels.
3. In regulated markets, be infrastructure, not a disruptor.
beglaubigt.de works with 300 notary offices. It doesn’t replace them. This means regulators are allies, not adversaries. Incumbents are partners, not competitors. And the moat is process orchestration complexity, not technology.
4. Build the API, not just the app.
The Incorporation API inside Qonto, Holvi, and Sevdesk is the real product. The beglaubigt.de website is the storefront. If you can become invisible infrastructure inside larger platforms, you get distribution at near-zero CAC and create lock-in that protects against competitors.
5. Use YC to reframe, not just to accelerate.
beglaubigt.de is a German LegalTech startup. Platus is a global legal infrastructure platform. Same company, completely different investor narrative. YC forced the global articulation and gave it credibility.
6. Build the cap table like a map.
9+ investors across US, UK, and Germany - mapping exactly to the company’s expansion roadmap. Every investor opens a jurisdiction, provides a network, or signals credibility for the next round.
7. Pick co-founders with overlapping conviction and complementary scars.
Sporenberg (operations, M&A, scaling at Razor Group) and Gerlach (product, infrastructure, Rocket Internet + Passbase). They’d already built and sold a company together. When investors back repeat founder duos with a shared exit, they’re not betting on an idea. They’re betting on a proven machine.
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The Vision: Two-Phase Model
Sporenberg laid out the long game on Startup Insider: phase one is stopping the brain drain. Phase two is making Germany a founder hub again. “We have this strong economic base. Now we still have the painful bureaucratic processes. If we can turn that around, I can very well imagine Germany becoming an attractor for entrepreneurship again.”
The current metric: 15% of formations on their platform are already fully digital. The target: 25% within the next few years. “So the founder doesn’t have to go to the notary anymore but can genuinely found a company from their smartphone.”
That’s the pitch to investors in one sentence: we’re not just building a SaaS tool. We’re building the infrastructure that determines whether Germany’s next generation of founders stays or leaves.
Want the full step-by-step playbook? The detailed breakdown of each framework, including the regulatory timing model, the API-first distribution architecture, the cap table mapping strategy, and the sequel company checklist based on Sporenberg and Gerlach’s actual process, is available for paid subscribers down below.