This article is a part of Poland Unpacked. Weekly intelligence for decision-makers
After PizzaPortal.pl, iTaxi and SunRoof, Lech Kaniuk has picked another industry for a technology-led overhaul. Together with Lars-Erik Wessman, he is developing Kepta Legal, a startup that aims to transform legal services for companies through artificial intelligence and process automation.
Some entrepreneurs spend decades building a single company, guiding it through successive stages of expansion. Others are simply wired to keep creating new businesses. Lech Kaniuk clearly belongs to the latter group. He is one of the better-known figures on the Polish and Swedish technology scenes.
He began building technology-driven businesses at an early stage of his career. He gained wider recognition after selling PizzaPortal.pl in 2012 for the equivalent of PLN 120m. He had founded the service with partners just three years earlier.
In the following years, Kaniuk became an early investor in and chief executive of iTaxi and SunRoof. The former grew into a significant player in Poland’s taxi market. He built the latter – a European alternative to Tesla’s solar roofs – with the ambition of creating a unicorn, a startup valued at at least USD 1bn.
Now he is betting on the combination of technology and corporate legal services with Kepta Legal.
“With each successive business, I understand risk better and my ambitions grow. From the outset, we are building Kepta with international markets in mind. We want to create one of the leading next-generation legal-services companies. We are starting in Poland, where we can test the business model and prepare it for expansion. The first twelve months will show us how quickly we can grow and what we need to do to reach the scale we are aiming for,” says Lech Kaniuk, chief executive and co-founder of Kepta Legal.
“You can do things completely differently”
At both PizzaPortal.pl and iTaxi, the core of the transformation was moving services that had previously been ordered mainly by phone into apps and online platforms. With SunRoof, Kaniuk went a step further into technological innovation. In just over two years, the company raised around EUR 20m from an international group of investors to develop roofs that also function as photovoltaic panels.
After years of overcoming successive barriers, Kaniuk stepped down from managing SunRoof at the beginning of 2026, while remaining a significant shareholder. The timing coincided with the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
“I decided to build a business from scratch that would make use of it. I also wanted, once again, to prove that an entire sector can be approached in a completely different way. To some extent, I had already changed the restaurant, taxi and solar industries. This time, I chose legal services, which until now have been delivered in a very traditional way,” says Lech Kaniuk.
He recalls once being told that the businesses he had created had nothing in common. He sees it differently. He is not a specialist in one narrow field, which is precisely why he operates across different industries. The common thread is the use of new technologies to reshape existing business models.
“I sold my first patented solution when I was 18. With each new business, I am largely creating a new category. Innovation is an integral part of that process, but so is convincing the market that established habits can change permanently. It is always easier to create an entirely new technology than to persuade users to adopt it on a mass scale,” Kaniuk explains.
Legal services are resisting the AI revolution
Kaniuk sees legal services as a particularly interesting field because the way they are delivered has not fundamentally changed for decades.
“In a sense, the industry is resisting the AI revolution – one that cannot be stopped and is turning business models upside down. That gives me a chance, once again, to change the standards that shape an entire sector,” Kaniuk says.
Among his inspirations were the US-based Harvey and Sweden’s Legora. In just a few years, the two startups have reached multibillion-dollar valuations by offering AI platforms for lawyers.
“Because Sweden is very close to me from a business perspective, I even considered building an equivalent of Legora tailored to Central and Eastern Europe. But after looking at the market more closely, I realised how many companies were already developing different technologies for lawyers. I would have faced enormous competition. And with PizzaPortal.pl and iTaxi, I had already learned how difficult it is to compete with giants such as Uber,” says Kepta’s co-founder.
Technology for companies, not lawyers
Kaniuk therefore decided to approach the problem from the other side – from the perspective of law firms’ clients. Companies cannot do without legal services, and many of their legal needs recur regardless of the industry. Yet delivering those services still relies heavily on manual work, because even contract templates have to be adapted each time. The model is also largely reactive: a company approaches a lawyer with a specific problem, usually knowing the hourly rate but not the final cost of the service.
“And when a lawyer does not know the full context of the case or the business, everything takes longer. That is why companies prefer to work with a specific person and are often willing to wait until that lawyer is available. I learned this while running several companies. I also learned that no entrepreneur wakes up in the morning thinking they would like to buy a few hours of legal services that day. It all distracts from the business and creates additional costs,” Kaniuk says.
He argues that it does not have to work this way. Technology can automate processes, organize data and monitor companies’ ongoing legal needs, while giving lawyers the information and context they need to use their expertise far more efficiently.
“We are building a comprehensive legal-support platform for companies – from small businesses with no in-house legal department to companies employing around 1,000 people and operating with a legal team of several people. With us, such a department can work more efficiently and eliminate chaos in its documents. We are primarily targeting companies that process very large numbers of contracts,” Kaniuk says.
Automation rather than a simple platform
Kepta is not simply a marketplace connecting companies with law firms. It provides direct, comprehensive legal support built around two elements. The first is subscription-based SaaS software designed to serve as a company’s internal legal infrastructure.
Among other things, it can be used to draft contracts and amendments and to analyse documents for specific clauses, for example in connection with a dispute. It also supports document workflows and helps companies keep track of important deadlines.
“I know from my own experience how easy it is to miss a payment or termination deadline, and what the consequences can be. At one of my companies, we ended up having to rent an office we no longer needed for another twelve months. Today, companies have to monitor not only employment contracts, but also licences for various types of software and leasing agreements,” says Lech Kaniuk.
Legal services at a fixed price
The second part of the startup’s offering is directly linked to the first. The platform continuously gathers information that builds up a company’s legal and business context, taking into account both the specifics of its operations and those of the broader industry.
“With every new document and every matter we handle, the company’s ‘legal brain’ – its legal memory – grows. This accumulated knowledge allows us to automate more tasks and speeds up lawyers’ work on additional assignments, because they do not have to learn the client’s situation from scratch each time,” explains Kepta’s chief executive.
When human involvement is required, one of the startup’s lawyers steps in. Because the team already has access to the accumulated context, Kepta aims to complete a given task more efficiently and at a price agreed in advance.
“The client is therefore not buying hours of a law firm’s time, but a legal function that works efficiently. We plan to use external law firms only where necessary, for example when representing a client in court,” says Lech Kaniuk.
Fireside chat
How AI is changing the legal-services market
XYZ: You know the legal market from the inside and as a technology provider. From that perspective, how do you view what Kepta Legal is trying to do?
Piotr Sarecki, chief executive and co-founder of Infino Legal, restructuring adviser: I look at Kepta primarily from the perspective of someone who has spent years building software for the legal market. The most interesting part of its model is not the use of AI itself, because that is no longer unusual. Much more interesting is the attempt to move away from selling a lawyer’s time and towards selling a specific service or outcome at a price known in advance. I see a parallel with the changes taking place in the SaaS market [subscription-based software – ed.].
What do you mean?
For years, it was natural to pay according to the number of users of a system. But as automation and artificial intelligence develop, that model is beginning to create problems. If good software allows three people to do the same work that previously required ten, the provider may paradoxically start earning less precisely because it has made the client more efficient.
That is why other billing units are becoming increasingly important: system usage, the number of processes completed, cases handled or operations performed – and ultimately the outcome.
At Infino, we have been dealing with this issue for some time. Our system can be priced not only according to the number of users, but also according to the number of proceedings it handles. For larger clients, the number of people with a login does not always accurately reflect either the scale of system usage or the actual value we provide.
How does this change translate into legal services?
Hourly rates face a very similar problem. If technology allows a lawyer to complete a task in one hour instead of five, then under the traditional model the client receives a lower bill. But one lawyer told me about the opposite effect of using AI.
Increasingly, clients come to her with a legal opinion or document already prepared with the help of artificial intelligence and ask only for verification. They assume that “it just needs to be checked”, so they expect a correspondingly lower price. In reality, reading the material, finding errors, checking sources and correcting the whole document can take the lawyer just as much time – and sometimes even longer – than preparing it from scratch.
There is also the question of liability.
Exactly. A client may provide AI-generated text, but if a lawyer is expected to sign off on it and take responsibility for it, a quick read is not enough. That lawyer told me this is precisely why she increasingly does not want to begin the conversation with the client by quoting an hourly rate. She prefers to package a specific service at a defined price, describe its scope clearly and bill additional work separately.
This illustrates the change artificial intelligence is bringing to the market. It is not only about automating part of the work. Clients’ expectations about how that work should be priced are changing as well. They are increasingly less interested in buying five hours of a specialist’s time. They want to know what result they will receive, by when and at what price.
It is important to remember, however, that a fixed fee does not eliminate the risk associated with the final cost of providing the service. It simply transfers that risk from the client to the provider. That is highly relevant to Kepta’s business model.
Why?
If a client pays a fixed amount for a specific service, Kepta needs to know very precisely what it costs, on average, to deliver it. With AI, there are model costs, the number of queries and iterations, the length of the documents being analysed, agentic processes and infrastructure. But the most important cost may still be the amount of human time needed to verify the result and handle atypical cases.
Tasks that appear similar can require very different amounts of work. That is why the biggest challenge is product standardization – defining precisely what the client receives for the agreed price and at what point an additional service begins. If the model is poorly designed from the outset, a company may have a large customer base and a product that looks excellent, yet still generate low margins.
If the scope of services is defined properly, however, scale begins to work in the provider’s favor. Simpler cases offset more demanding ones, and with each new assignment the accuracy of cost estimates improves.
Finally, it is worth stressing that AI does not threaten lawyers themselves, or other specialists. It poses the greatest threat to the part of their work that has until now been done manually simply because no better tool existed. The value of human expertise will increasingly shift towards judgement, decision-making, negotiation and, above all, responsibility for the outcome.
Competition: law firms and AI-armed ‘lawyers’
Lech Kaniuk sees competition coming from two directions. The first is traditional law firms, whose services can be expensive and are still billed primarily according to time spent. The second is companies preparing documents such as contracts themselves with the help of AI tools, often using people with no formal legal training.
“In the short term, that may be cheaper, but over the longer term it creates serious risks, including loss of control over data, regulatory compliance and the quality of contracts. We want to show that the two worlds can be combined – technology and AI on the one hand, and legal expertise on the other – in a way that is safe and offers predictable costs,” says Lech Kaniuk.
Kepta Legal’s co-founder responsible for technology is Lars-Erik Wessman. He helped build Pizza.nu, which later merged with a competitor to form OnlinePizza Norden Group and was subsequently acquired by Delivery Hero for several hundred million Swedish kronor. He and Kaniuk met two decades ago at a Swedish startup incubator. Kaniuk later joined OnlinePizza.
“Lars-Erik has been a highly skilled programmer for 30 years, but he is also an entrepreneur. He combines business with engineering. That is why he is the right partner for me,” Kaniuk says.
Open to investors from an early stage
Lech Kaniuk sees Kepta Legal as his “next big thing”. He and his co-founder have been working on the project full-time for the past six months. So far, the company has required mainly their time, while capital expenditure has remained below PLN 1m. By the end of the year, however, the founders plan to raise up to EUR 2m, with the size of the round adjusted to the company’s actual needs.
“We are already being approached by foreign funds investing in legal tech. Poland’s Smok Ventures, founded by Borys Musielak, has also come on board. We could bootstrap [finance growth without external capital – ed.], but we would rather build something large more quickly and share the risk. That is why we are opening up to investors at an early stage,” Kaniuk explains.
The startup has already completed its first pilot implementations, including at SunRoof, and launched the official version of its product at the end of September. By the end of the year, it is targeting around PLN 5m in ARR, or annualized run rate – the annual pace of revenue implied by current performance.
“To get there, we need around 120 clients. By then, we will probably employ more than a dozen people, including nearly ten with legal expertise. We are recruiting a sales director and a head of product. We will also be looking for programmers and GTM engineers [engineers working at the intersection of technology, sales and marketing – ed.],” says Kepta Legal’s co-founder.
Investor's perspective
More founders can now raise capital ‘blind’
We had already worked with Lech at SunRoof. And I have to say that although the market environment was difficult – even Elon Musk removed solar roofs from Tesla’s offering this year – Lech handled it the way he should have. He did everything he could, and I never lost faith in him. He is an excellent entrepreneur, which is why I was looking forward to the moment when he would be ready to start another project. I believe this could become something big.
There are already several dozen technology entrepreneurs in Poland who would have no problem finding investors willing to back their next project almost “blind”, before knowing exactly what it will be. I always find it easier to make that kind of decision with people I have worked with before. Bartek Roszkowski is one of them. After Alokai, we invested in his next business, Proteine Resources. The same is true of Jacek Szlendak, who has also completed several successful company exits.
The situation on the Polish market is therefore completely different from a decade ago. Back then, it was often still unclear what individual founders were really capable of. Since then, many of them have had time to prove themselves.
Poland is only the beginning. Europe or the US could come next
Lech Kaniuk expects Kepta Legal to require less capital than some of his previous ventures. SunRoof is built around an expensive physical product and therefore requires substantial working capital.
“With PizzaPortal.pl and iTaxi, meanwhile, we faced high customer-acquisition costs combined with a low value per transaction. We therefore had to invest heavily in building a sufficiently large base of returning users. In businesses like these, the ‘winner takes all’ principle often applies. Kepta Legal should be far more capital-efficient. We expect the combination of services and SaaS software to deliver higher margins and greater average revenue per customer,” says Kaniuk.
He expects the company to break even as early as 2027. But he does not see any specific level of profit as the main objective. His priority is to build a large international business. Once the model has been proven in Poland, the company plans to invest heavily in international expansion.
“At this stage, we are considering several directions. Countries in our region are naturally the first that come to mind. But because legal systems differ despite the EU single market, it may prove more efficient to make a strong push into one large Western European country. The United States looks the most attractive, however. If we decide to expand there, we will do it with a local team. So the time difference will only be exhausting for me,” Kaniuk concludes.
Key Takeaways
- Another tech venture from a serial entrepreneur. After co-founding several technology companies and spending years building SunRoof, Lech Kaniuk has launched another business. He wants to use the AI boom to change the way legal services are delivered. “With each new business, I am largely creating a new category,” he says.
- Combining technology with legal services. Billion-dollar startups offering software for lawyers have already emerged in Europe and the US. Kaniuk initially considered building a Central and Eastern European equivalent, but ultimately chose to focus on providing legal services directly to companies. Kepta Legal combines subscription-based software with lawyers’ services. The system automates part of the workflow and builds an organization’s “legal memory”, allowing subsequent tasks to be completed faster and at a price agreed in advance.
- Concrete targets and international ambitions. Kaniuk’s co-founder is Lars-Erik Wessman, and both founders are now working on the startup full-time. Capital expenditure has so far remained below PLN 1m, but the company plans to raise up to EUR 2m before the end of the year. Smok Ventures has already joined as an investor. Kepta Legal is targeting around PLN 5m in ARR by year-end and, once the model has been proven in Poland, plans to expand internationally.