Copenhagen's SmallClaims raises €2m seed from Vendep to take AI debt litigation beyond Denmark

SmallClaims, a Copenhagen legaltech company that uses AI agents to pursue small debts through the courts, has raised €2m in a seed round led by Vendep Capital. The Finnish fund backs early-stage B2B software companies in the Nordics and Baltics. The round was announced on 13 October, and no other investors were named.

The deal matters because of the size of the claims. Disputes worth a few thousand euros often go unpursued in Europe. Once lawyer and court fees are added, chasing them can cost more than the debt itself. SmallClaims is betting that software can bring that cost down far enough for creditors to go to court over amounts they would otherwise write off.

A lawyer's answer to the unpaid invoice

Christian Olson started the company in 2021. He studied law at the University of Copenhagen, worked as an attorney at Løje IP and later served as general counsel at Too Good To Go, the Danish food-waste app. In Denmark, SmallClaims handles claims of up to DKK 100,000, which is about €13,400.

The platform covers each stage of a case. It assesses the legal merits, tries to reach a settlement, files with the court, follows the case to judgment and then moves to enforcement. AI agents do most of the work. The company's own lawyers check what the agents produce, and if a case has not settled by the time of the hearing, a SmallClaims lawyer appears in court.

According to the company, this has cut the manual work on a typical case from more than 15 hours to about an hour and a half. That gap explains the business model. A claim that would need two working days from a junior lawyer becomes worth filing once it needs ninety minutes.

3,200 cases and a 90% win rate

SmallClaims says it has more than 500 customers. They fall into three groups: debt collection agencies, law firms, and companies with large volumes of unpaid invoices. In 2025 it handled more than 3,200 cases. It says case intake grew by more than 370% between 2023 and 2025, and that it wins over 90% of its cases.

The company has not shared revenue, its valuation or the size of its team, and the win rate is its own figure, with no published definition of what counts as a win. Even so, 3,200 cases a year is a meaningful volume for a five-year-old company working in a single country.

Vendep partner Jupe Arala said the fund invested because of Olson's mix of courtroom and in-house legal experience, combined with a platform built around AI from the start. Vendep has form in this area. In 2023 it led a €2m round in PatentRenewal.com, another Copenhagen company that automates a routine legal process.

Where the €2m goes

SmallClaims plans to spend the money in three areas: more development of its AI agents, entry into other European markets, and hiring at its Copenhagen headquarters. It has not said which countries come first or when.

That choice is the hard part. Small-claims procedure is national. Each country has its own thresholds, court forms, filing systems and enforcement rules, and in most places only a locally qualified lawyer can appear for a client. A model built on Danish procedure, with Danish lawyers checking the agents, cannot simply be switched on in Germany or France. Each new market will probably need local legal staff and changes to the agents' workflow.

For founders working on legal automation, the round shows what early-stage investors want to see. SmallClaims is not selling a general AI tool to lawyers. It runs a whole service with lawyers checking the output, and it sells to customers whose losses from unpaid invoices are easy to measure. The next test is whether the time savings it reports in Denmark carry over to a second legal system. Its plan to grow the Copenhagen team suggests the core product will stay there while it does.