DeepJudge ranks third at the Top100 Swiss Startup Award 2025

Bronze at the Top100 Swiss Startup Award 2025 goes to Zurich-based DeepJudge. Founded in 2021 by Paulina Grnarova, Kevin Roth, and Yannic Kilcher, the AI startup is rethinking how lawyers' access and use their internal knowledge, turning vast data and documents into value across the business.

For the 15th time, a jury of 100 investors and technology experts has selected the 100 most promising startups in Switzerland. DeepJudge is third at the Top100 Swiss Startup Award 2025. Founded in 2021, the company now employs around 30 people and is redefining legal efficiency.

AI-powered platform turns lawyers into team players
During their doctoral studies, Paulina Grnarova and Yannic Kilcher worked for Google Research in Zurich. “There,” says Grnarova, “we learned first-hand how much potential there is in search engine technology, particularly beyond pure keyword queries.” Back at ETH’s Institute for Machine Learning, the two earned their PhDs and soon after founded the legaltech startup DeepJudge with fellow AI expert and ETH alum Kevin Roth.

“Several visits to law firms had shown us that these companies were sitting on vast amounts of data that they were not using,” recalls Grnarova, now CEO. She’s referring to court rulings, internal meeting minutes, expert opinions and studies, and correspondence with courts and opposing counsel. Together, these materials form what is known as institutional knowledge: the sum of empirical knowledge and goal-oriented procedures that define a company.

The three founders set out to unlock this treasure for potential customers through a SaaS platform. Their first product was an in-house search engine that combined traditional keyword search with semantic search. “Our system understands the intent behind a search query and categorizes the results,” explains Grnarova.

In September 2023, two and a half years after founding the company, the young entrepreneurs acquired their first client: the Swiss-wide law firm Homburger. “What made us particularly happy," says Grnarova, “was the high level of acceptance of our tool among the client’s employees.” Four out of five lawyers used the semantic search in their daily work.

In June 2024, DeepJudge launched its Knowledge Assistant. This digital assistant, based on generative AI, independently compiles legal documents using records, judgments, and expert opinions that the search engine uncovers from internal and external databases.

Just a few months later, the third product followed: a workflow assistant for legal professionals. The tool consists of 10 to 20 modules that allow customers to map entire workflows. Classic legal procedures, such as searching, classifying, summarizing, extracting, and comparing documents, can be triggered and sequenced with a mouse click.

Financing is progressing rapidly: the seed round in summer 2024 secured CHF 9.5 million in capital, laying the foundation for expansion. DeepJudge’s clients now include law firms in the DACH region, Canada, and the US. Many of them employ several hundred lawyers, making them particularly receptive to the Swiss startup’s value proposition: the larger the organization, the greater the impact of a platform that makes its tacit knowledge accessible to each individual.

DeepJudge currently has 10 employees in the US – the world’s largest legaltech market – compared with half that number at the beginning of the year. If the company succeeds in gaining a foothold there, Grnarova’s declared goal will be within reach: “We want to become the world’s leading AI platform for lawyers.”


Stefan Steiner (Venturelab) and Kevin Roth (DeepJudge)

This article by Jost Dubacher was first published in the Top100 Swiss Startup Magazine 2025.