# Maite.ai

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/maite-ai/ · added 2026-11-06 · updated 2026-11-06

**In short.** Maite.ai (AI legal copilot for Spanish lawyers: case-law search, drafting and document analysis, Spain): Sold to Doctrine after €800K ARR reported (about US$950K), February 2026. Evidence grade D: reported, not verified. Team: 3 founders (CEO, CTO and CMO) who built it without investors; the total headcount at the sale was not published. Launched October 2023; sold 28 months after launch.

AI legal copilot for Spanish lawyers: case-law search, drafting and document analysis · Spain · AI-native · team of 2 to 10 · sold · group: Legal and law firms

- Outcome: Sold to Doctrine after €800K ARR reported (about US$950K), February 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: D; headline in US dollars: 949600)
- Launch: October 2023; months from launch to the outcome: 28
- Team: 3 founders (CEO, CTO and CMO) who built it without investors; the total headcount at the sale was not published
- Outside funding: None before the sale, according to Merca2 (bootstrapped); bought by Doctrine in February 2026
- Main factor: Proof
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 2, capital needed 1
- Tags: AI-native, Small team, Bootstrapped, Exit, B2B, Legal

Links:

- Visit maite.ai: https://www.maite.ai/

**The product.** A chat assistant for Spanish legal work. A lawyer asks a question or uploads a contract or a brief, and Maite.ai answers from Spanish legislation and case law, drafts documents, and points out risks in the text. Firms can add their own documents to a private library, and a case-file feature keeps the instructions and documents of one matter together. The pricing page lists plans per user per month, with a yearly discount.

**Why it worked.** Three founders built it without outside money in 2023, and the first message, that it replaced lawyers, scared the customers away. They changed it into an assistant for lawyers, connected it to the Spanish official gazette and court decisions, and had it take the Spanish judiciary entrance exam in front of a notary. According to Merca2, that public test turned a handful of customers into hundreds a month. Doctrine, a French legal AI company, bought it in February 2026.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

Maite.ai is a legal copilot: an AI assistant that works next to a lawyer instead of replacing one. It searches case law, the published decisions of courts that lawyers cite as precedent, and Spanish legislation from the BOE (Boletín Oficial del Estado), the official gazette where Spanish laws are published. It also drafts documents and reviews contracts that the lawyer uploads. The pricing page sells it from €99 a month per user billed yearly, VAT not included.

Alejandro Castellano started it with David García as CTO and Álex Rodríguez as CMO, without investors, a method called bootstrapping: growing only from customers' payments. The Spanish legal magazine Economist & Jurist wrote in May 2024 that it launched in October 2023. Merca2, a Spanish business newspaper, wrote on 10 June 2026 that it reached more than 2,150 customers and more than €800,000 of ARR (annual recurring revenue: the yearly value of the subscriptions running at one moment). Doctrine announced on 12 February 2026 that it had bought the company, that its ARR grew twentyfold in 2025, and that it served more than 2,000 customers.

The €800,000 figure was stated only by Merca2, on one date, so this page grades it D: reported, not verified. The buyer confirmed the sale and the growth rate but no amount, and no source read for this page gave the price. The page also shows earlier legal-technology companies that failed.

## Pricing

Maite.ai prices on 6 November 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C). The page gives euros without VAT; US dollars at the Federal Reserve H.10 rate of 30 October 2026, US$1.1163 per euro

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | 0 | 0 | 20 interactions |
| Pro, 1 user | 110.51 | 139.54 | €99 / €125; unlimited chat, document upload, private library |
| Max, 1 user | 132.84 | 167.45 | €119 / €150; Pro plus smart case files |
| Biz |  | custom | from 6 users, licence per organization, phone support, account manager |

Prices are for one user. The page's user selector shows more seats at a lower price per seat: for 5 users Pro costs €265 a month billed yearly or €337 billed monthly, and Max costs €319 or €405. The yearly plan is one payment in advance with 20% off, according to the page. Biz is a licence per organization from 6 users, price on request, and a separate plan exists for public administrations. A free trial gives 20 interactions.

## How much did Maite.ai make, and what was it sold for? The numbers, graded

A Spanish legal AI assistant built by three founders without investors and sold to a larger French competitor about two and a half years after launch; the revenue figure comes from one newspaper article

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Annual recurring revenue before the sale | more than €800,000 | D | Merca2, 10 June 2026: "pasó de tres fundadores durmiendo tres horas al día a facturar más de 800.000 euros de ARR" (went from three founders sleeping three hours a day to billing more than 800,000 euros of ARR, translation). One newspaper, one date; the same article also writes "varios millones de facturación" (several million in billing, translation). | [1] |
| Headline in US dollars | about US$949,600 a year | calc | Calculated: €800,000 times US$1.1870 per euro, the Federal Reserve H.10 noon rate of 12 February 2026, the day of the sale announcement. | [1, 9] |
| Sale | bought by Doctrine, announced 12 February 2026; price not disclosed | A | Doctrine's press release: "Doctrine, the European leader in legal AI, today announced the acquisition of Maite.ai". Its fifth acquisition in three years. Maite.ai keeps its brand, headquarters and team. | [2] |
| ARR growth in 2025 | twentyfold | A | Doctrine: "In 2025, the company increased ARR twentyfold". No amount given. | [2] |
| Customers | more than 2,000 (February 2026); more than 2,150 (Merca2, June 2026) | A | Doctrine's release, and Merca2: "alcanzó 2.150 clientes". Customers include solo lawyers, large firms, legal departments and public administrations. | [2, 1] |
| Launch | October 2023 | C | Economist & Jurist, 8 May 2024: "El lanzamiento de Maite.ai se produjo el pasado mes de octubre" (Maite.ai was launched last October, translation). Merca2 says it was founded in 2023; Doctrine says founded in 2024. | [3, 1, 2] |
| Founding team | 3: Alejandro Castellano (CEO), David García (CTO), Álex Rodríguez (CMO) | C | Company page: "La visión de tres personas más un gran equipo" (the vision of three people plus a great team, translation). Merca2 quotes the founder: "Nosotros éramos tres ingenieros" (we were three engineers, translation). Total headcount not published. | [5, 1] |
| Outside funding before the sale | none | C | Merca2: "sin un solo euro de inversión externa" (without a single euro of outside investment, translation). | [1] |
| Early traction | about 2 customers in early 2024, then 7, then hundreds a month | C | Merca2's account of the founder's story. It ties the change to the judiciary exam result. | [1] |
| Spanish judiciary entrance exam | 86/100, later 99/100 | C | Merca2 says the first test was taken before a notary and that ChatGPT scored 25 points lower. Doctrine's release gives "a 99 percent success rate". The company's press page lists articles that give 96/100. | [1, 2, 6] |
| Users on the company's pages, November 2026 | more than 120,000 registered users and more than 3,000 customers (company page); more than 100,000 and more than 2,500 (press page) | C | The two pages of the same site give different counters on the same day. | [5, 6] |
| Time from launch to the sale | 28 months | calc | Calculated: October 2023 to February 2026. | [3, 2] |

How to read this table: grade A is the buyer's own press release or an official exchange-rate table. Grade C is the company's own pages or a press interview with the founder. Grade D is a figure reported by one newspaper on one date with no second source. An "X" value was computed on this page.

## When did Maite.ai launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From an idea on a holiday in August 2023 to a sale to Doctrine in February 2026. Each entry carries its grade.

- **August 2023** (grade C [1]): On a holiday in Greece, Castellano, who had worked in the legal sector, decides to build an AI that writes and analyses legal texts, and programs the first version.
- **October 2023** (grade C [3, 1]): Launch. The first slogan, "Adiós abogados. Hola, Maite" (Goodbye lawyers, hello Maite), scares law firms, and the team changes the message to an assistant for lawyers.
- **Early 2024** (grade C [1]): About two customers. Demonstrations fail when lawyers test it with trick questions; the team adds the BOE and millions of court decisions.
- **8 May 2024** (grade C [3]): Economist & Jurist interviews Castellano: three legal-technology developers lead the product, and the plan is a tool that each lawyer adapts to their own work.
- **2024 to 2025** (grade C [1, 2]): It takes the Spanish judiciary entrance exam before a notary and scores 86/100, later 99/100. Customer growth rises from 7 to hundreds a month, according to Merca2.
- **2025** (grade A [2]): ARR grows twentyfold, according to the buyer.
- **12 February 2026** (grade A [2]): Doctrine announces the purchase, its entry into the Spanish market. Maite.ai keeps its brand, headquarters and team.
- **10 June 2026** (grade D [1]): Merca2 reports more than 2,150 customers and more than €800,000 of ARR at the time of the sale.
- **November 2026** (grade C [7, 4]): The site is live with Pro, Max and Biz plans and announces more than 230,000 new court decisions from 2025 and 2026.

## Why did Maite.ai work?

### Assistant, not replacement

The first slogan said goodbye to lawyers, and lawyers did not buy. The same software sold once it was described as a helper for the repetitive part of the work: searching case law, drafting, checking contracts. The buyer of the software is the person whose work it touches, so the message had to make that person stronger, not redundant.

### A public test that lawyers understand

Lawyers tried to catch the AI with trick questions. The answer was a test that every Spanish lawyer knows: the judiciary entrance exam, taken in front of a notary so that the result could not be disputed. According to Merca2, growth went from a few customers to hundreds a month after it.

### Local legal data

A general chat model does not know the Spanish official gazette and court decisions well. Maite.ai loaded them and keeps adding new ones, such as the 230,000 decisions of 2025 and 2026 announced on its home page. The buyer's release names this local data as the reason for the purchase.

### No investors, so a sale was possible early

With no outside shareholders, the founders kept all of the company, according to Merca2, and could accept an offer from a larger competitor two and a half years after launch.

## How it was built

The sources say little about the technology. These details come from the company's pages, the buyer's release and two press articles (grade C unless marked).

- A chat interface over a large language model with retrieval from Spanish legislation (BOE) and case law. The sources read for this page do not name the model or its provider.
- Users upload PDF and DOCX files into the chat, and firms build a private library of their own briefs and internal case law.
- Security claims on the pricing page: AES-256 and TLS 1.2+ encryption, SOC 2 and GDPR compliance, anonymization of some client documents.
- Subscriptions are paid by card through Stripe; the pricing page links customers to a Stripe billing portal.
- The company website runs on WordPress.
- The team works fully remote, according to Merca2, with an office address in Barcelona on the company page.

Sources: [7, 4, 1, 5, 2]

## Who tried this before Maite.ai, and why did they fail?

Three companies in our database of failed startups promised to automate legal research or legal work and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### ROSS Intelligence (2015 to 2018; funding US$13M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: AI legal research that finds relevant case law faster than the old databases.
- Why it died: Lawyers stayed with Westlaw and LexisNexis, whose data and integrations were hard to leave.
- Record: 

### jEugene (2015 to 2018; funding US$120K; cause: Competition)

- Promise: A checker that finds errors and inconsistencies in contract drafts.
- Why it died: Broader AI contract tools arrived, law firms adopted slowly, and it needed custom work for each client type.
- Record: 

### Atrium (2017 to 2021; funding US$75M; cause: Product/Tech Failure)

- Promise: Automate legal work for startups, faster and cheaper than a large law firm.
- Why it died: The automation could not handle real legal complexity, so costs stayed high while quality did not match established firms.
- Record: 

## What changed

ROSS Intelligence and jEugene tried to answer legal questions and check contracts with the language technology of 2015, which needed a lot of training data and custom work for every legal system. Atrium tried to replace the law firm itself. All three faced lawyers who did not trust a new tool against the established databases.

Maite.ai started after large language models made it cheap to read and write legal text in Spanish, so three people could build the product without investors. It also avoided the replacement message after its first slogan failed, and it answered the trust problem with a public exam result. It did not have to beat the established databases alone: a larger European legal AI company bought it for its Spanish data and customers.

## Can one person copy Maite.ai now?

**Verdict: In another country's legal market, perhaps.**

The method needs knowledge of one country's law and its public legal data, and a test that local lawyers respect. One founder with legal and software experience could start it; Maite.ai needed three people and more than two years. The local markets are being bought up: Doctrine has made five acquisitions in three years, so a copy competes with funded buyers as well as with the large legal publishers.

1. Pick one country's law and load its official gazette and published court decisions.
2. Sell to the lawyer as a helper for search, drafting and contract review, not as a replacement.
3. Prove accuracy with a test that the profession knows, under an independent witness.
4. Charge per user per month from the first version, with a firm plan for teams.

**What is still open.** Legal markets in smaller languages where the large legal AI companies have not yet arrived, and narrow areas such as tax, labour or administrative law inside one country.

## What could go wrong for Maite.ai?

- **What is not verified.** The €800,000 ARR figure was stated only by Merca2, a Spanish business newspaper, on 10 June 2026, four months after the sale, without saying who gave it; the same article also speaks of "several million" in billing. The buyer, Doctrine, confirmed the purchase, the twentyfold ARR growth in 2025 and more than 2,000 customers, but no amount. No source read for this page gave the sale price. A reader could look for the company's accounts in the Spanish commercial register or a buyer's filing.
- **Team size not published.** The company page names three founders "plus a great team" and the buyer plans "significant hiring", but no source read for this page gives the number of people at the sale. The team label on this page is the founding team.
- **Dates and counters that disagree.** Merca2 says the company was founded in 2023 and Economist & Jurist dates the launch to October 2023; Doctrine's release says "Founded in 2024". The company's own pages show more than 3,000 customers and 120,000 users on one page and more than 2,500 and 100,000 on another, while Merca2 gives 2,150 customers and 70,000 users.
- **Now part of a larger company.** Since February 2026 Maite.ai belongs to Doctrine, which says it serves 27,000 legal professionals in five countries. The current site and prices are run under that owner.
- **Competition.** Other legal AI stories on this site, such as Jurisphere and Descrybe, sell research and drafting assistants in other markets; in Spain, Maite.ai competes with the large legal publishers and now carries Doctrine's resources.
- **Dependence on model providers.** The sources read for this page do not say which large language model Maite.ai uses. Merca2 compares its exam score with ChatGPT's, which shows that it measures itself against general models that its customers can also buy directly.

## Sources

1. Merca2, 10 June 2026: Maite.ai: el bootstrapping que llevó a una startup española de IA legal a ser adquirida por Doctrine — https://www.merca2.es/2026/06/10/maite-ai-startup-bootstrapping-adquisicion-2393756/ (grade D). Read in full (Spanish). Source for the €800,000 ARR, the 2,150 customers, the founding story, the exam results and the absence of outside funding.
2. Doctrine Newsroom, 12 February 2026: Doctrine acquires Maite.ai, Spain's leading legal AI platform, strengthening its European leadership — https://doctrine.pr.co/261823-doctrine-acquires-maite-ai-spain-s-leading-legal-ai-platform-strengthening-its-european-leadership/ (grade A). Read in full. The buyer's own release: the acquisition, the twentyfold ARR growth in 2025, more than 2,000 customers and the founding year it gives.
3. Economist & Jurist, 8 May 2024: Alejandro Castellano, CEO de Maite.ai: «Nuestra aplicación de IA ayuda a ser más productivos a los abogados» — https://www.economistjurist.es/entrevistas/alejandro-castellano-ceo-de-maite-ai-nuestra-aplicacion-de-ia-ayuda-a-ser-mas-productivos-a-los-abogados/ (grade C). Read the open part of the interview (Spanish); the rest is for subscribers. Source for the October 2023 launch and the three-person founding team.
4. Maite.ai pricing page (Planes y precios), read 6 November 2026 — https://www.maite.ai/precios/ (grade C). Read in full, including the per-user prices in the page source. Source for the pricing table, the security claims and the Stripe billing portal.
5. Maite.ai company page (Compañía), read 6 November 2026 — https://www.maite.ai/compania/ (grade C). Read in full (Spanish). Source for the three founders, the counters and the Barcelona address.
6. Maite.ai press page (Prensa), read 6 November 2026 — https://www.maite.ai/prensa/ (grade C). Read in full (Spanish). Source for the press list with the 96/100 exam result and the second set of counters.
7. Maite.ai home page, read 6 November 2026 — https://www.maite.ai/ (grade C). Read in full (Spanish). Confirms the product is live and the announcement of 230,000 new court decisions.
8. Latka company page: Maite.ai — https://getlatka.com/companies/maite.ai (grade C). Read in full. Names Alejandro Castellano Sans as founder and CEO; it gives no revenue or headcount.
9. Federal Reserve statistical release H.10, euro historical rates, release of 2 November 2026 — https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h10/hist/dat00_eu.htm (grade A). Read the rows for 12 February 2026 (US$1.1870) and 30 October 2026 (US$1.1163) per euro.
10. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.

Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run Maite.ai? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: Maite.ai).